“The far shore wore a gauzy veil of rain./Dark thunderheads rose over Evian/and shook the silver surface of the lake,/ruffling like shot silk.”
Following Bishop
Come follow, if you choose, the clacking heel,
the slender foot, the measured step,
the darkening tide, the silvery shingled shore,
the heavy, mirthful scent of orchids in the air.
Come sit beside the coiling nimbus of her cigarette
to examine these disjecta from the chambered sea
beneath the world’s fluorescent glaucus light,
and witness all these prodigies of cruelty and lust,
the ceaseless slap of wavelets on a littered beach,
these sambas made from common speech. Come hear
her sly exactitudes all primly buttoned at the throat,
the bulky continents by color rearranged. Take note
of every shy insistence in the ear, each daylight dread,
these soft sonorities that bring the farthest things up close.
This Excess Our Sentience
What is this bluster in our weather
that accumulates as thought? why these
bucking headwinds in the languid mind?
And why exactly does the alien thing appear
upon the vague horizons of attention?
Who is it ferrets through our waking sleep?
What is it out there always manages
to come unwrapped and fly apart?
What anxious energy inheres in things?
What is it in the modest distance
of the dormant other thing that seems
to animate the barricaded silences in you?
and summoning this lonely plenitude you are,
cannot ever seem to simply leave you be,
apart, aloft, adrift in mournful isolation?
Perhaps recumbent in the perfect stillness
we expect within ourselves, securely wrapped
inside each one who feels and thinks and speaks,
lies one who somehow isn’t really you at all,
and from its unprotected quietude cannot otherwise
than rise, respond and interrupt your peace.
It seems sometimes as if your tidy separation
from the world out there’d been left to lie
undone, unfinished, inconvenienced at the very least,
by a separation so intense it’s left a surplus
in its wake, some vital organ dangling out, some feral
stuff within, to leave you in this sorry state
where everything you see addresses you
in the senseless stammer of desire, the ever-present
voice of absence, some wholeness that you lack,
the yearnings of your porous skin, the qualms
of sentient flesh, the way mind’s inconvenient
images arise at the distant end of black.
Amnesia Palace
People fix in their minds places of the
greatest possible extent…such as a large
house, divided into many apartments.
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria
Out of nowhere, a stiffening breeze.
He opened his eyes.
The far shore wore a gauzy veil of rain.
Dark thunderheads rose over Evian
and shook the silver surface of the lake,
ruffling like shot silk.
Below his narrow seat down at the quay,
along the little inlet, black swans drifted,
dozing unperturbed in the rising chop.
All the canvas chairs around him
billowed out and wildly flapped,
and made an irritated, snapping sound.
He closed his eyes again.
The odors of the old hotel behind him
coiled in his nostril, the shabby corridors,
the musty galleries, the once-grand,
high-ceilinged chambers of this crumbling palace,
this disheveled refuge out of season.
Drifting in the soft spray
of the approaching storm, he wandered
in and out, it seemed, into the musty
corridors of long-forgotten thought,
past the empty niches of the mind lined up
along the winding walls of recollection.
Untethered syllables like sleek ball bearings
slid and weighed beneath the arching palate,
skittered and collided like billiards arrayed
upon the green baize surfaces of memory,
rolled like tapioca on the tongue.
Once the squall had passed,
the bellman ambled down the hill
to fetch him up for tea, this solitary pensioner,
living relic of the old school, whose thickset
poems posed so many intractable difficulties
for the unsuspecting reader.
Startled, he awakened slowly
into the shafted light. The redolent
melodies of dreaming lingered, ringing
in his anxious ear, while all the swans now
gliding proudly in the Autumn light, darkly
rose like omens on the mirrored lake.
DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. His work has recently appeared in Tar River, Sequoia Speaks, Blue Unicorn, Neologism, The Ekphrastic Review, The Decadent Review, and many other journals. His first collection, Tarantula Season and Other Poems, was released in 2023, and is available on Amazon.
