Jon Davis
Paseo de Acertijos
It’ll all come to pass. That’s the hell of it,
the beauty—some terrible accident
between your epiglottis and your epi-pen,
some charade the answer for which
involves both the Heimlich maneuver
and the unheimlich. They say the ineffable
is like mercury on a tabletop, silver
and uncatchable. But who
they are remains a mystery.
The way no one can say why
when you think of your Aunt Matilda,
you see a spotted salamander
slowfooting it from under the rotten log
you rolled over hoping to find
a spotted salamander. There’s a word for that,
but it’ll be several minutes before
it floats into my head. No worries.
It’s always been that way. You think
of the brilliant retort long after the time
limit for brilliant retorts has expired.
Ten minutes after your friend’s
Uber driver has arrived, you remember
it was Brian Jones they discovered
staring at the sky from the bottom of the pool.
What he must have seen from down there—
the heavens through a watery lens, the colors
of this mortal world refracted and swirled,
the theology of it like discovering ants
climbing out of a hole in your palm.
Glad they’re gone, but then they keep coming.
What We Wanted
We wanted to gather our families
and friends and eat together. Wanted
to wake to music and work. Wanted,
some of us, to read in a hammock
beside a willow, or in a window seat,
a book about a woman in love
or someone else who was hooded
and taken away by masked men
in the night. But we did not want to be
those people–the man with the wrong god,
the woman “too free in her dress.”
We wanted, instead, to listen to birds
calling from the thickets, wanted
to watch the sun streak the late sky
orange and red, to watch children
dancing in a park or running in circles
until they tired and fell, laughing,
into each other’s arms,
unmindful for a time of the men’s
plans to build tunnels and rockets,
to drag us all into a history those
men made so long ago they must
repeat it lest they, too, would forget
amid the graces of the day–moon now,
crisp and bright over the city, each room
beneath it lighting up with lamplight
or firelight, the children coming to table
for whatever food they are allotted,
whatever warmth they are allowed.
Jon Davis is the author of seven chapbooks and seven full-length poetry collections, including, most recently, Fearless Now & Nameless from Grid Books. Davis also co-translated Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan’s Dayplaces (Tebot Bach, 2017). He has received a Lannan Literary Award, the Lavan Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He taught creative writing and literature for thirty years, twenty-eight of them at the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 2013, he founded the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at IAIA, which he directed until his retirement in 2018.
In January of 2024, Davis and poet/guitarist Greg Glazner formed the band Clap the Houses Dark. Their first album, which mixes poetic language with complex rock compositions, is streaming on all major platforms. The New Mexico Music Awards chose the song “Over the Transom” as one of five finalists for the 2025 Indie Rock song of the year.
Banner Art:
Photo by Michael Worden, Unsplash, 2019
