DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico, USA.
His work has been widely published in journals throughout the US, UK, Europe and Israel.
His collection Tarantula Season and Other poems is available on Amazon, and a second collection, Flight Risk, is scheduled for release in 2025.
His Difficulties
He held the world a knowable thing. Thoughts,
the greater mysteries, sailing in and out of view
like hungry Swiftlets, thrummed the air.
An orchard orbited beneath his purpling sky.
There is in all this alien noise, he knew,
a grim, remorseless striving to be understood,
a ruthlessness alert in the arresting hand,
some ingenuity required to occupy the listener’s
least attentive ear, her disembodied breath,
to penetrate the cool indifference images provoke,
arouse the aimless concentration sounds require
insinuate the mortal difference meanings make.
He channeled all this swirling tide of indirection
through the ragged cutbanks of the intellect,
pruned back the infinite allusiveness that poems are,
and redirected oceans past familiar stands
of hornbeam, birch and sycamore to populate
his vast disorienting landscapes with familiar sights,
horizons for the sure dead-reckoning they’d need
to navigate the fleet frivolity of thought, negotiate
his obdurate, his irreducible, difficulties.
Emblems of Alterity
What cannot stand among the present things,
and can’t be said to speak or seen to disappear,
what never hides or shows itself, or dwells
within the superfluities of atmosphere,
is nonetheless a supplication on the way to you,
the way desire insists in what you see and hear,
the way familiar strangers will defile your dreams
in unfamiliar dialects that linger in your ear
to prompt the concrete thought, arouse the abstract
skin, provoke the wild infuriations of your sleep
with insubstantial evidence of all you’ve lost
or sought to lose, and all you’d hoped to keep.
Physics 101
It rises from the depths and ascends into
the sky, its voice filling the spring winds
that scatter autumn leaves.
David Hinton, The Four Chinese Classics
When the distant mountain rumbles,
dragon is that distance.
When dragon coils in coiling air,
this turbulence is dragon.
As dragon spirals, coil on coil,
these spirals are the circling days
that cycle in the circling blood,
and churn like starlings overhead.
* * *
Dragon breathes water, fire, flesh
and stone. In and out. In and out.
When dragon shakes his mighty head
and laughs, this laughter is our grief and joy.
Dragon dances, capers, makes its way
so slowly you won’t notice, yet
her velocity can take your breath away,
this swiftness you and dragon share.
You cannot yield to dragon, can’t resist.
So sorry; there’s no higher power there.
* * *
Dragon isn’t something hidden everywhere,
or something nowhere to be found,
since dragon never will appear at all,
except in all that sightless folks imagine
drifting on the scaly underside of cloud,
in the courtly pomp of seasons,
across the stately nighttime sky,
above the veiled saltpeter moon,
in every feral dream’s meanderings,
in thunder’s flashing light, the creeping tide,
the scratching noise of nineteen sunsets,
each slashing pen and whispering brush,
the slither of a woven belt through belt-loops,
a roaring Norton’s throaty whine.
* * *
In dragon is the gaiety of atmosphere,
the madness in our sky,
the aimless paths we wander, day by day,
the twisting galleries of our desire,
the emptiness of troubled seas,
time’s looping arabesques arrayed
beneath her jeweled lid, her coppery scales,
the flicker of her half-remembered eye.
* * *
When springtime’s swollen rivers roar,
this turmoil is the thrashing tail of dragon.
When someone watches from the mirror,
this stranger is the utter foreignness of dragon.
When stillness settles in the evening air,
such reticence is the purling voice of dragon.
Scissiparity
Batter my heart, three-person’d God
John Donne, Holy Sonnets
…but realized to my dismay that the intruder was nothing
other than my own reflection in the mirror of the open door.
I still remember that I thoroughly disliked his appearance.
Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche
You cannot see them both at once,
those two reflections in the glass:
the one that stands before you now,
what caught your interest as you passed.
This newly freshened image of yourself at rest,
composed, adjusted to your scrutinizing view,
such soothing restorations won’t be reconciled
with the shadow of that grim preconscious you,
with the baseless malice of that perfect stranger,
a Doppelganger mirrored on that storefront space,
adrift among the pale reflections rushing past,
who only for an instant showed his face,
and for that fleeting moment held your rapt
attention fast as it aimed its hostile, predatory glare
directly at your fear, while mockery flickered
in its wanton, cruel, unblinking stare.
Try as you might, you cannot hold these images
together or apart; the culprit here is time.
What’s past has left you helpless in its grasp,
on the darkened stage of unrequited crime.
These multiples of one who stands before
his reconstructed self, each hazy mannikin you flee,
this reassuring image in the glass, articulate
what’s alien in you and that which stirs in me.
Pastoral
The canyon walls above our orchard
magnify the rock squirrel’s sharp report,
the news that death’s been spotted skulking
somewhere in the neighborhood, caparisoned
as Bullsnake, Harris Hawk, or ghostly Coyote.
Our dogs are masters of this semeiotics
of the scolding Magpie or apoplectic Jay,
and hope eternally to ambush unawares
the predator himself, beguiled, enthralled,
distracted by the presence of his prey.
While these diligent dogs’ scant record
of performance, I’ll admit, is anything
but stellar, and their success rate hovers
right at zero, I, who occupy the role of hero,
have learned from them how meanings seem
to summon us obliquely in an unfamiliar voice
from the faint collaterals of our rapt attention,
from a speaking spoken elsewhere than the locus
of our fascination, as a whispered chorus, antiphon
or admonition we’re only all too happy to ignore.
The Galway Review 