Jasper Johns Was Here, by DB Jonas

Jasper Johns Was Here

                                          Things the mind already knows
                                                                            Jasper Johns

What moved you to remove 
our precious furnishings from the room,
to set the chair within this dancing air just so
that the wrinkled unfamiliar smile of things,
the explicit typeface of our mundanity,
just sits there, smug as Schrödinger’s dream, 
that each silent object, each brash intrusion
of every ubiquitous, reticent integer
calmly grooms its paws in a solitude
that knows no bounds, where almost gone,
it cannot adequately leave, but leaves behind
the lingering Cheshire purr of isolation, 
each lonely thing that sovereign identity 
seems never able to contain, each familiar self 
that sends its own relentless absence streaming
shyly through our amply furnished world, 
unnoticed by the grim determined passersby?
 
What was it moved you to position in the mind
our own dear Plato on his uncategorical chair, 
to situate them both precisely in this spangled light 
that we might think we’re here to see 
each one of them, this infinitely replicated man
upon his sturdy immaterial chair, vanished
in the neutral daylight we’ve assumed to lie
between our firm observing place, let’s say,
and your airless crumpled pulsing scenes,
their razored edges leaving our indifference
always free to leave, and always free to stay?
 
What is it, once we turn away from you,
that finds the old familiar world
we thought we knew had come unhinged 
to languish in a flattened, mottled, haptic state,
where all our streaming standards bled and bleached, 
where all our ample breathing distances collapsed,
we find our domesticity’s been rearranged
in such a way that we, against the trembling edges 
and occlusions seem to always trip, 
though all the gentle furniture’s removed,
upon an inconvenience passing strange?

​Jasper Johns

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.