If There Be Speaking
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells.
GM Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire
To enter this garden
in the horizontal light
of early morning
is to blunder uninvited
into a conversation without
intention, without end,
encountered in medias res, where speech,
if there be speaking,
goes for the most part
unheeded, where meaning
is not what meaning means
among the interlocutors
of pressing human business,
among the code-talkers, between
participants in a shared
and sheltering system. To enter
this garden is to be exposed
to a bright atonality, a hilarity
of dialects defying concordance,
where each thing declares the things
it’s not, where each fine thing,
innocent of irony or innuendo,
declaims its entanglement
in a convolution of interceptions
and interferences, the hazardous
transversals of which we humans dream,
to which we impute shape
and happy harmony, and so declare them Nature.
And if here we find peace,
perhaps it is that here
we are reduced to silence,
and in this slanting morning light,
in the unauthored eloquence
of this leaf, this weather,
these blooms and stones, must
suffer gladly the disaggregation
of our own precious personhood,
our burdened self-containment,
far from that cozy “being indoors”
where each presumes to dwell, and stand
instead outside the house of speech
and oh so briefly greet
this wild exposure, the vivid efflorescence
of life’s relentless dying,
in mute response past all replying.
DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. Born in California in 1951, he was raised in Japan and Mexico. His work has recently appeared in Tar River, Blue Unicorn, Whistling Shade, Neologism, Consilience Journal, Poetica Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Amethyst Review, The Decadent Review, The Amphibian, Willows Wept, Sequoia Speaks; Revue {R}évolution (https://www.revuerevolution.com/en/db-jonas) and others.
Amethyst Review 