Angel and Other Poetry
By D.B. Jonas
These pieces both appear in D.B. Jonas’ collection Tarantula Season and Other Poems
Angel
The angel was here, not a moment ago.
All that remains, I’m afraid,
is that jangling jackhammer in the street,
the distant sirens.
You will wait right here all day,
but the angel has always only just departed.
Your lover was here just now.
It’s a wonder you did not see her
on the stair. All that remains
is the scent of almond blossoms in the air,
intimations of the dark cascade, a disappearance
of caraway upon the tongue.
This bitterness is a song without words.
Wreathed in the unremembered melody,
you will sit here all day, unmoving.
From the backs of your hands,
tendrils, tender, pallid as pea-shoots,
reach into the room.
From your palms the thirsty root-hairs
descend into the floor.
Your only job is words
and the vanishing sound
words barely leave behind.
Mnemosyne
Heavily the sturgeon drifts
over the ancient mud, her lazy sway
barely disturbing as she passes
the silted floor that heaves
and settles quietly beneath her weight.
Patient harvester of unheard voices,
monstrous harbinger of silences,
she slips past all the hooks and chains
of memory’s clattering apparatus,
always busy dragging at the bottoms
for the evidence of time, the sparkling
detritus of someone else’s past.
Unhurriedly she surfaces
always out of season, only when
there’s no time to prepare, always
before thought and after recollection,
only ever a pale suggestion in the shallows,
scarified, indistinct, slick as the muddy bank
around her, leaving in her passing
only the random scourings, the odor
of abandonments, the imprecisions
we weave in hopes of that day
when we’d feel her great bulk thrash
against our desperate grasp,
even though we know full well
that that would be the day we’d see
our desires hauled steadily, irresistibly
into her domain, into the turbid,
weightless realm
of someone else’s dream.
DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. His work has appeared widely in journals throughout the US, UK, Europe and Israel. His first collection is titled Tarantula Season and Other Poems.
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Every time I read D.B. Jonas I come away thinking that he has a heightened sense of perception, which is essential, of course. for a poet who perceives angels and ' the scent of almond blossoms' among the jackhammers and the distant sirens of the everyday, and who then endeavours to hold something of their fleeting presences in the barely adequate net of human words. This is a fine poem. (I mean 'Angel') Now I must read 'Mnemosyne'.