Jill Jones


Three Sonnets

Calling occupant …

Is this the way a planet falls?
The sounds of violent waves
in the desert, the lumber
of interstellar machinery, the trek
of starry folk songs. You don’t
regret the harvest of snow, now
you wonder as the doors drift
apart — who are these little guys

neither glamorous nor weird?
Your words for it tremor with
harmonies lent to you by comet cloud.
Once they made movies about yr heart
hear the depth charges, hear the joy.
All gone to shit — and moonshine.



In the hour of blows

After fate, you’re emptied and resolved
counting cracked lots. It’s easy to destroy some things
tearing up treasures in a drawer, any portion of ill plates.
Plastic caps continue to continue with hardly a whisper at leaking catches.
A spirit-sick narcosis fills languages with the road’s old charm.
Music, clear and dark behind a wall, sounds freely its extended death.
Open space and dark sirens tear the top off morning
when other zones have given up that hot puncture from alcohol.

To go determined, disjoined, into a lost country
whose taste of forest the next dance liberates
what one hour has beaten.
This is the allure of cold dark work
the flagstone, the ratio and the protections.
Nothing is the same silence.


Clouding

When I look up the cloud has nine colours
at a glance all courses seem to aquify.
Perhaps it’s on account of the helium glare
or rain that blows backwards like a bird.

Certain days receive you well.
They’re traversed within buildings
though you long for an ochre connection.
The luminous has gone peripheral.

The surrounding dust is timed with pulp
even seizing the wing; blow-blow
down the country which can’t read another
words passing very close to vision.

Sunshine knows its yellows more than
the ozone that eats its heart in circles.



Jill Jones' latest books are Broken/Open (Salt, 2005), shortlisted for The Age Poetry Book of the Year in 2005 and the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize in 2006, and Fold Unfold (Vagabond, 2005).

She won the Kenneth Slessor Prize in 2003 for her fourth full-length book, Screens Jets Heaven, and has collaborated with photographer Annette Willis on a number of projects, the most recent being Breath, the hours in The Drunken Boat.

Other recent work has appeared in The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, Jacket and MiPOesias. She keeps a blog called Ruby Street.


 
 
 
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