There Are No
Extras
It’s all busy
even at ground level
hello cellophane, hello ants
days beget days
that’s the charming
the little songs
jumping out of backpacks
and while koalas
fall from the trees
and offer us their thirst
that’s past cute
like all les urgences
flood, drought, five cents left
in any language
is something even these
two tourists expand, give them
a map or a branch
of Christmas bush
while they wait at the
interchange, time for
tannin and sugar
readjust kit, the long
city road melts
inviting, eh
no extras needed
all here
Jill Jones
Yearn For You
Perhaps it starts with the ravens, it seems
like conversation, perhaps you still call them
crows
in an old dream the unknown neighbours neighbour
check spotty rain, flatbed & dog, cold
chisel
is it sun making the hens go, barbara ann’s in
number one
ignoring us, you can’t go back, we have no
church clothes, you can never go back
small inscription in concrete
grass fires, temperatures, witnesses, no clothes
no rain to bear, buzzing flies, buzzing leaves
peggy sue scrapes paving, the ravens stop
you can’t compare this rain
now beginneth, you don’t return
to a dream of your old clothes
Jill Jones
‘What
Are My’
WHAT ARE MY clothes worth what
are my clothes if they fall or are
taken within a box that if taken
away to be burnt or buried sailed away
on rivers which disappear breezes on
borders and roads and grid brown borders
wilder when they fall and flake wilder
with my naked arms naked ears with
sounds burning sounds burying sounds
saved in particles and streams not saved
but scattered as tokens in roads but
not any more than more or if more not
less than other than this hope less
free scattering no return falling free
…
Sometimes you want to say even here
is elegance even as it falls apart in the
opulent choking time spinning air
Jill Jones
What the critics say:
"poetry of unsettling mystery and beauty. ... passionate and parodic at once, as cool as all get out." The Australian
"... building bridges and points of access and communication, forming a whole, prescient and often deeply moving experience." Poetry International Web
What Jill says:
"I'm interested in relationships between states and locales, shifting borders, the openings in closures, pleasures of exploration, the great themes, like the weather. Walking is important, slow mobility across terrain, the temporal process.
I’m working somewhere between the lyric and something more broader, more discursive, so I move from either investigations of interiority or sensuality merged with the figurative which may also speak to larger structures. The poems have become a broken song – fragmented, flagrant, floating - perhaps an abstract or ruined lyric, where ‘I’ has shifted from the centre.
The way I work has evolved from a continuing interest in texture, pattern and transience, of jumping in the midst of the flow, experience in language underway, asking questions about how the pieces don’t fit as shards alter meanings."
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