And the World is Breath
‘Clouds … they are the principal reality of the day and I’m as preoccupied with them as if the clouding over of the sky were one of the great dangers that fate has in store for me. … Clouds’
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
I set sail every morning
unhooking day from night
The window is a breath
The north is scudded
with patches of white
A cloud is a breath
Not all days have clouds
but here they are
The passing train is a breath
A cold wind blows
over the summer
The fallen nest is a breath
Every return is a pattern
one map undoes another
I stare into a clear dark sky
as planes fly across
night in a diagonal
The interrupted dream is a breath
I’m wandering with ghosts
against screens and machines
There are no clouds
The sky seems to be humming
A receipt from an auto-teller
is a breath
The air is full of leaves and wind
but no clouds
A parking space is a breath
A gum tree against
the clear blue seen
from the bus is a breath
Memory is every breath
Ghost clouds float
in the hot blue
above the parklands
Every second is for something
Forgetting is another breath
Stars From Ruins
I feel a breeze as it brushes
my bones
of hydroxyapatite
the unbalanced the lost
When my desires find surfaces
a place for shaping
ancient and beautiful as galaxies
The first rock may have been
a bright diamond carbon
My feet catch on the grit life
all my stones tossed or extracted
my underground my circles
a table a tunnel a wall
whose shadows tell of secrets
love can often be hard
Each shift is a translation
dissolves into the world
a ditch of hells and fault planes
a niche for safe-keeping
a circlet of star systems
skin and my daily salt
I take this graphite and mark
lines under the daylight
Each stone is a pillow
a rest an augur
a road. a foundation
even when cracking
It’s not only shadows that fill up
with secrets
the weather is leaning and wilting
like a doomed princess
I grew up in sandstone in the charms
of east coast winds
I’m a small creature here are my atoms
they are me and so many
other things
I sit on my ruins
remain until dark
when rocks shine like worlds
_________
Jill Jones’ latest book is entitled Wild Curious Air. In 2015 she won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry for The Beautiful Anxiety. Her work has been published in periodicals in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Ireland, Sweden, Singapore and NZ. She edited, with Michael Farrell, Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets. Her work has been translated into Chinese, French, Italian, Czech, Macedonian and Spanish. In late 2014 she was poet-in-residence at Stockholm University.