Error
The gardenia is dying
leaves yellowing flowers shrivelling –
to be exact I didn’t know how too much
love might kill unknowingly
in a single day
mottled brown leaves
falling in brickish blanket drifts
beyond what I’d meant to salve –
truce no longer possible
I sweep the dead into plastic bags
my soul’s errors and miscalculations . . .
all the young branches stripped . . .
I’m falling through summer’s
eddies of doubt – budless –
in a chasm of lost purpose
o come to me o garden
there will be no more love –
no more summation of love ≠ love –
we’ll gaze over the fence together
where nothing knows what we are
Metronome
To be solitary
after the dishes have been dried and put away
news tuned to a blank screen
the text of a book blurring into wavering signs –
take shadows – they hold only
night’s stunned ghosts
dishevelling sleep with beckoning shipwrecks
a shoreline’s incessant voices . . .
faint surprise – that some so young
have passed through the bead curtain
fringed with macrame and synthetic lace
man-made and frail –
time passes as if metronomic
each brief day and night
smaller than before – each presence becoming absence
each day unutterably new yet unaltered
________________
Jennifer Harrison is an Australian poet. She has published eight collections and her ninth Sideshow History will appear in 2023 from Melbourne’s Black Pepper. She has work forthcoming in the Australian Poetry Anthology and was featured in Best of Australian Poems 2022. Among other prizes she has received the 2012 Christopher Brennan Award for sustained contribution to Australian poetry.
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