10th Street Women, by DB Jonas

Woman 1, by Willem de Kooning (USA, b. Netherlands) 1950-1952

10th Street Women
 
                                  "Content is a glimpse of something. An encounter like a flash."
                                                                                                             Willem de Kooning
 
Lepidopterous
she noiselessly unfolds
from the swaddling 
moth-light
beneath these 
 
crazed impastos
an insolent wing
the feral moisture
of a mocking smile 
each stockinged
 
thigh implied
implicit in these
silken tremors of
her savage after-
image rising as if 
 
through flocks 
of startled pigeons 
as if glimpsed ascending 
into twilight’s grime-
stained airshaft
 
past the streaming
shimmer of empty 
window panes into 
evening’s horn-
tormented streets.
 
Observe how
all around that
brutal absent gaze 
each zig-zag crowding
contour seems
 
to carom backward past 
the reckless aberrations 
of the wrist effacing
every swift abruption
of his searching hand
​
to softly leave behind
what only flutters 
indistinct to leave 
behind itself the
crumpled evidence 
 
of last week’s news
a sillioned contour map 
of what it is or was
that’s so precisely
absent here
 
or maybe wasn’t 
really even ever there
but left such slashing
concentrated absolute-
ness in its wake 
 
that our hapless 
abstract speech
might only barely 
trace the furtive flap 
of time’s erasure
 
encounter in this
stark loquacity her 
imperious escape  
only the vivid vicinities 
of her departure.

DB Jonas

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. After several Wanderjahre in Spain, France and Italy, he studied philosophy and literature at the Universities of California and Padova, and earned postgraduate degrees at Princeton and Yale. Following his retirement from a long career in business and the sciences, he returned to the practice of poetry. His work has recently appeared in Tar River, Blue Unicorn, Whistling Shade, Neologism, Consilience Journal, Poetica Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Jerry Jazz Journal, The Decadent Review, The Amphibian, Willows Wept, Sequoia Speaks; Revue {R}évolution and others.