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. Further examples of his work can be accessed at jonaspoetry.com
Tristes Tropiques
On Stevens
It is always daybreak there. The slant light, the back-lit leaf, the saline breath
of tropic Springtime on the skin. Autumns, present and departed, fixed in amber.
Past master of the à propos, he manufactures arias that fracture on arrival, the fragrance
of lost things, their lingering, the ornate silver, each heirloom salver of desiring.
What delicious lexicons arise and shatter on the substance of the insubstantial! What
images of all that managed to escape attention, what startled idioms of dispossession!
Ice sculptures sail like swans upon the mind. He’s left this mirrored trail of ice behind,
lapidary in the lifting light. We’re left to navigate the crystalline flotillas of his thought.
You’d think he’d put our overheated rhetoric to bed for good, but no, since poems
surface only from the powerless in things, the impersonal, the inconsequential.
So think on it, if you’re so inclined. Just what is it we expect from poets now?
Chronicles of indignation? Outrage? Gross injustice? Canticles of feeling deeply felt?
If so, his works are doomed to disappear in time, to deliquesce like swans of ice at noon,
but this Spinoza of our climate met his passion in the coolest mornings of the intellect,
in the soundscapes of desire, in vocabularies that predate thought, predate indignation,
to invoke the vulgates of a distant weather, auguries of other Autumns, other Springs.
It seems it’s always morning there. A slant light without irony. Leaves tremble softly
in the air. Otherwise, his imperfect world lies still, unchanging, cocooned as if in amber.
Ainadamar *
Sometime in the early hours, he realized that calm
had filled the trembling space where dread had been,
and in the deafening din of locusts through the pines,
along this hillside somewhere over Ainadamar, recognized
the strange relief that only utter hopelessness can bring.
His poet’s skin received the strident music bodies made,
the brutal, skittering vibrations, felt it escalate across
the wooded valley, into the steeply rising walls that rose
around the tiny villages below, to ignite the atmosphere
and set the colonies of rock and pyrophoric pines aflame.
I saw myself a fashioner of unexpected images, he thought,
of bright unlikelihoods that lived already in the reader’s mind
and occupied her reason like recurring dream, but always
it was the epidermal sounds in words that I’d encounter there,
in rude licentious contact with each other, and with me.
Before the dawning image, before the mind’s awakened speech,
it was the clarion vowel, the quiet consonant’s percussion,
I know now, that had awakened every song and left no choice
but chance to dance upon the page, to lead the hand through
trackless forests of imagining, the senseless noise of meaning.
And the urgent, swarming music of those insect bodies now,
their unmodulated frequencies, called up for him the way the noise
of talk, brought close upon the page, inspired the fissile music
of his craft, the way the beckoning world proposed itself to him
as fracture, as lubricious cacophony, as lurid, fleeting beauty.
So perhaps there is some sense in all this after all,
this specific body’s senseless martyrdom to time and history,
the injustices that lead us where they may, into this specific
cooling shade, this blazing furnace of a single buzzing afternoon,
where life’s unmerited, untimely leaden gift awaits us all.
From somewhere high above the village street, a sharp report
of rifle-shot unsettled the communal air. Briefly, the bustling
marketplace went silent, and briefly all the locusts seemed
to hold their breath. Then softly, bit by bit, the living murmurs
rose again, into lofty senselessness, into indifference, into life.
* In August of 1936, the poet Francisco García Lorca was apprehended by Phalangists in Granada. Two days later he was executed, along with others, on a hillside above the reservoir Ainadamar, The Fountain of Tears. When asked by his friends why he was being apprehended, his captors replied, “Sus obras:” “His works.”
Present At the Dawn of Creation
The most incomprehensible thing
about the world is that it is
comprehensible.
Albert Einstein
Morning’s dawn exploded from the ridge
with a shout today, setting all the dripping leaves
and sailing clouds ablaze, declaring itself arisen
with the brio of heralding brass in the Resurrexit
of the B minor Mass. But this celestial fanfare
rose without a sound – almost.
Somewhere in the distance, a magpie scolded.
Everywhere, the softly dripping aftermath
of an early morning downpour. Wandering
overhead, dark cumuli abruptly cancelled
the patinating light and released it once again.
One moment to the next, these oscillations
stripped the glitter from the leaves, and just as soon,
they’d incandesce as if the morning’s brash
arrival seemed to need a period of settling-in,
required a decent interval of temporizing pulses
to free itself from night.
Otherwise, the stillness in the air was absolute.
So absolute, you’d swear that it had made
a presence in your ear, a thing like sound,
a noiseless rush, a deafening quiet, whose silent
pressure seemed to hold the leaf, the breath,
the morning light and morning dusk,
and all the breathing planets, in suspense.
And what exactly was your place, your role
in all of this? you remember thinking then.
What room was left there in that silent world
for the busy whirring of your silent thought?
You, who could not manage to remain
outside it all, and could not somehow enter in?
What vantage point was granted you, granted
to your searching ear and penetrating eye?
What special privileged place from which
to appreciate the miracle of dawn’s
prodigious sky?
None of these, I think, no place at all. It is
as if we stand aside and watch, it seems to me,
as if all thought takes place at the farthest margins
of the real, as if the seeing eye, the listening ear
and thinking brain – creations, incarnations,
of the vibrant world around us, formed
of pure vibration and unbridgeable distances,
extruded from reality like light, like matter –
may only occupy that wild, remote, eccentric place
assigned us by the world itself, accept the special fate
that’s ours alone, and with this solitary flesh,
this bleak haphazard thought, this croaking voice
and jangling lyre, give praise, as Rilke says,
give praise for every briefest gift, each bright
disastrous dawn, each god-forsaken squall,
all sudden onslaughts of a brazen sunlight
in our morning sky.
The Galway Review 