Jill Jones

Sometimes an Ant

Attention is a register as it dreams
   small dashes in the garden
streaks of moments in sunlight
      an economy of fragments
   gathered by time
speed as thrift and expansion

The day closes without
   the discretion
of an envelope
      speech still sounds
   and rattles among wood
and metal bitumen plastic leaf

Sometimes there’s rain
   and that’s
always brief
      nothing really closes over 
   sentences and phrases
scattered through yards and streets

Sometimes an ant rolls a stone
   tiny dust is huge
or an equal task to the task of
      a bird splashing
   in a pool or an
ocean



Falling Shadows, Dizzy Seed, Changing Each Memory Song


1.
Moon time and bee time are different
and the same when your time’s up

it’s time for rain which is the veil
and also clarity through heat
sharing air with light

is this not an original art ever falling
as though repeating what can’t be
repeated drop by drop


2.
Panes of winter
its skeletons
wet shiny shadows

bending blue
into each seam
of the world

from sky stacks
sewing weather


3.
Dizzy at night on the footpath, losing it, vertigo
Mirrors in the lift, something to avoid
The hours that never finish are also never still
At the entrance hard to enter

Verticals aren’t easy
There’s too much space on the page
Opened into spreading as a form of walking

The letter I never wrote


4.
as if there was more
space
in the continuum
for a song

whose chanting
sticks to you like a seed
using you to travel further than
you’ve ever been


5.
Can air be sweet?
It’s not weightless.

Substance is distressed.
We are killers.

It is always dark
when the song’s singing.

We’re receding, not vanishing
and changing paradise.


6.
Who can say what each window on the square
could uncover or experience

What might be the attention of light
the push of summer, the extent of capital
arrangements of gods and choirs
a furore of government as if there were laws

As if what was grown stayed in place, as if
in each place, this could be said


7.
the natural state is
turning, there’s no true
forecast without tomorrow’s
work, the old dog scratches out
repetitions, an evening’s
mote of dust now resides
in memory and the garden’s
ferny root systems


8.
The newspaper spreads beyond the table
Shadows have their own colours
More hate speech

Is there some kind of process when crossing a line?

The announcements roll by too quickly
A red door is closing

The wall demands letters
Minutes drip like a song



Standing Under

How it thins —
      autumn
         skin
            the social contract

Standing under a tree —
      the old nests
         frailty

Yet the ground
      this solid dust
packed into a star

Everyone wants you dead

      Who can avoid it
between
       this scratched earth
           the filthy sky —
wide
   older than

And still to come

Fuck you!
It’s my death
   not yours



Possible Manners Of Revelation

I translate roses as multiples, a rose and a rose and a rose

I paint all my corners different colours

I welcome my own redundancies, and all that time to kill

I resurrect the dead for a second when I close my eyes

I slide that agnostic load from my shoulders in a flash of unearthing

I face east then west to respect my indirection

I swallow the moonlight and hope it may ward off the sincere and embarrassing shadows I’ve shed

I return to multiples

I alphabetise my dreams hoping for order

I set fire to my opinions and wait for the truce

I find lost amulets in the gutter left by cyclists or the stars and bless them again with unchained secrets

I strike light into the dark passage where the summer moths return

I forget my body is what I have with me until my fingers and breath do their work

I tinker with the time it takes to remember

I remember everyone I forgot

I promise the invisible I will return one day

I lean against the transcendent, listening to the honeyeaters fight in the camellias

I talk to absence like the one who has gone

I ask emptiness to fill me

I deface all my damage because the world won’t forgive me

I recite a history of my own breath, which is the poem



Between Here and the Underworld

          I am an answer, I am a question, as if I was
the god’s favourite. I’m the left hand, struck
blind to see, struck with age and breasts. I’m this sex
which is, is not, in all my tender clothing. I was
a book, maybe still am, a bit turned or stained
by fingers, or the sun, as I’m hunting my text for
the wild irregular. I’m a vindication of darkness, I’m
this button which is not one.

          I’m wrinkled time, born in the sick house.
I could hear evening on its way, I was the present tense, 
younger than anyone for a split-second, fresh-ancient
storm-red, closing on Khaos, mother night. I’m still
dancing myself whole, in cursing loneliness, in the
forgetting of wisdom, still hungry, on the hunt
and bedevilled.

          I’m living between here and the underworld, or
leaning out of the window reflecting on existence,
still hearing the birds, their omens in my backyard under
that hole in the sky. I’m living with ten parts of love
in one body, present and future, dust and bread. What
did I learn as a woman? Or a man, the man
I had to be, to be invisible.
 
         I’m often parallel to myself or to you. If I say
‘I’ll see you in hell, or in heaven’ I will, of course. Or
in the corridor as we pass, where I’m jaunty under
the circumstances, a wager of dissidence
and beer. Or I’m in the mood for love,
perhaps, perhaps, an echo of night, where things
rise and tumble.

          I’m still on my feet, holding out for all those
stained future tenses. Here are my arms, this body which
is, is not, in all its wild and cursive hunger.

Note: The poem alludes to a number of book titles, including The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin; This Sex Which is Not One (Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un), Luce Irigaray; Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein; Hunting the Wild Pineapple, Thea Astley; The Present Tense, Gwen Harwood; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft; A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle; The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall; The Getting of Wisdom, Henry Handel Richardson; as well as films by Roy Andersson, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, and Wong Kar-wai, In the Mood For Love.

Jill Jones is an Australian poet whose recent books include A History Of What I’ll Become (UWAP), Viva the Real (UQP), and Brink (Five Islands Press). Her work has been translated into Chinese, French, Italian, Czech, Macedonian and Spanish. With Scots-Australian poet Alison Flett, she publishes chapbooks through Little Windows Press.
 
 
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