Our Sweet Unbending
by Jill Jones
Invention greedily unbends our ground space.
Buffoonery is undamaged by glass spirit.
Broken, this white crack, wiping lips.
Each violation is a wrinkled circus.
Vegetable basins, legato lawns, decomposure worn.
Sacrificial rain harpoons our cheeks.
Throats, twiggy offspring, spitfires splash us.
Howl with the top off!
Plays of childhood, the dangerous unknowing.
The worms in mulch are ignoramuses, there’s no elegant search.
We continue our views, those botanic winters.
Old hangars, unoccupied, patrol of cobwebs.
We like the invitation of jade grass and feeling wobbly.
Through slothfulness we get near the music.
At the table, colours of bop fight for supremacy.
Pages of tea collect, fatigued blood-brown fortunes.
After the revolution of eyes, angles of sun.
I prefer the noise of ultramarine, a shade with generosity.
Freshness flames, day’s in-breathing.
Clothes our deeper skins, affinities with ions.
Shrubs, aphids, autopsies, impressive steps.
The pastel horizon is a cover-up for impatience.
A courageous frost travels the cycle between.
We observe the shape it has formed.
We raise luminous hours to penetrate identity.
The daily paper is our buy-back, a cocktail of discretions.
We hesitate like cellophane at the surface of evening.
Our sign is the sky, that it lowers night.
If the abyss is indigo, we circle its answer from memory.
On-track from dirt to effort, experiment with deltas.
All the effects have been cancelled.
Here’s to midnight and the lower surfaces!
Jill Jones’ most recent books are Broken/Open (Salt Publishing, 2005) and a “tiny” handwritten book, Speak Which (Meritage Press, 2007). Forthcoming in 2010 is Dark Bright Doors from Wakefield Press. Her work has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, Polish, French, Italian and Spanish, and has featured in a number of anthologies including The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry edited by John Kinsella. In 2007 she was a featured reader at the 23rd Festival International de la Poésie in Trois-Rivières, Canada, and in 2009 she took part in the Micro-Poetry Festival in Prague and Brno. Recent work has appeared in ecopoetics and Otoliths.
