DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the 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 work can be accessed at jonaspoetry.com

Not the Landscape

Success is like some horrible disaster
Worse than your house burning.
Malcolm Lowry, After the Publication of
Under the Volcano

This is not the landscape of your long-held dream,
the dream at last arrived, the dream that on arrival
disassembled all the yearning world that radiated
from the consolations of your ancient yearning self,
that by arriving turned you loose among the unfamiliar
contours of an unfamiliar space, and whose arrival
sent your trusty compass needle spinning in its case.

Good fortune’s frayed the labyrinthine webwork
of your former circumstance and all the filaments
desire wove, the exquisite embroidery of need,
the steadfast gravitation that secured you to the ground.

The constant dream that shaped the needful world
in which you moved has come unglued. And here,
where what you wished has come to pass, you find
yourself another creature, creature of another mind,
an alien race, the child of other yearnings, other loss,
bewildered by the landforms your desires left behind.