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Notes/ with self
self in weather
self with the owls
self that's gone away
arrangement of self
what doesn't self know yet
something intimate, something large
there's nothing in repose - even in the head
something on the level and
something unconscious
self and the hard men
self not bothering
selves with rain on their clothes
watching selves listen to music
rust and green tips, new gestures
the ongoing argument of selves
the tornado pen with words
self past murals - the flat otherworld
self and wet hair
self and creased newspaper
self and results
wet rails
keep self moving
the neverendingness
the push-me pull-you
tags and dangles, clasps
self arrives
and departs at angles
The method?
Doubt
tomorrow
dark dry language
ignition into extremity
red dog of form
deep abundance
smooth modernities
wharves, comfort
the continuous screw?
What of
impatience, cancellations
pressed light
the polished wound
sky-crossed endings
notorious hands
with careless colour.
Forget to polish
acetate of knowledge
traversed interiors
disturbed night
emergency neon
sleepy operations.
Perhaps self portraits
combat with flight
duration with money
somebody’s tobacco
poinsettias
swilling boys.
Open strong boxes
necessary music
great, a sigh
lights to speak
the warrior smell
a soft-bitter bar
prison of cheques
winches, nervous suns.
Wake
danger in hierarchies
enchantment and reflection
barbarians
the taken railroad
interiors, winter
gloves, hoardings
probabilities
the great ruin.
Hook red color
rupture
expensive outposts
eye on time
a version of today.
Self criticism in the bath
I lower myself, loiter in streams
that know nothing of me or my dilemmas
simply water for my feet.
As if roses were trying to sound
from the many red lips I’m bathing
the circumstantial - divine fountain -
inside a rime of time, restricted white tears.
I parade secrets across surface
my naked faith in repose
a place of god water dividing, forking
purifying lights, curtains
over my white immortal stars.
To change me into coming, becoming
in the flickering
to smooth away creases
where snakes an ancient vine under showers.
If my roof was caving in
would I lie here, sweat dissolved exhaust
close my eyes into silent distance
deeper through night than long-departed?
As though I am truly cleansed
running waters like a madwoman
trailing my linen thighs, indifferent
to changing light and weather
trying to crash my dark retina.
Knowledges
Given
yesterday's regulations
the ash began.
Knowledge's
internal conclusions
vibrates considered rain.
Collapse
of forms
an outside possibility.
Abundance
equips fabric
this outside broken.
Until
my night
taste equips hours.
Therefore
to end
where existence enters.
Chronometer
drops ash.
Here's the rise!
After reading Chronicles Volume 1 in a spring shade
My sad-eyed,
You forever in the now but I must tell you
that day I sat down feeling strange
under the polished gold warp of ever-old
ever-young spring, reading Dylan’s ‘Chronicles’
that covers up, astutely, all returns and crossings.
It’s absurd, piquant, just think, the famous face
now unkempt, rejecting that it was the free one
the rest being anybody's estimate, except your own.
As chronicles are given to flight, to disown a place
its defects, its stealthy rent, don’t you think
we're all becoming geezers even if mystique
suggests colours of possible
the decades before obstructions and Madonna
materials of commerce.
Shall I compare it to this year’s other
Clinton's ‘My Life’, a calculation after experience
and a curiosity for sides well-taken care of
interest with emptiness, ideas written painfully.
The great songs register imbalance
Blowing … Wind within the heart’s cred
a singer among serious people, a tyro of 1961.
New York installs its sketch of belated memories
a period of edge only defined as it happened.
Folkie peers became the opposition.
To jump to 1970 (great star) and 1987 (tired lion)
an extended camelot codified by strange returns
spellbinding in its hokum, oh, you were the one
and fraudulent, transparent directions.
Callow games of fantasy, one part Huckleberry
immediate, ingenuous, wily, sceptical
invented under a hard rain’s scrabble.
You couldn’t say no to a wonderful ear, admit it
bending associations from the early sixties
when convention changed its confetti
ignited a twang of Twain
through blues sketches that decreed
the times are for a-huckstering.
With the incarnation of the folkie
we amused ourselves
dreams excited our artistic buds.
The early adventures of Bob and comrades
eating for free in restaurant kitchens
a tomato-done dirty screen, scars
the call of Village Juliets.
The kitchen was like a cave
he says, deadpan, and the joke throws itself
over rounded edges of expectedness.
Refusing chain gang rags, for
reputation, effacement, mythography.
American incarnations, mid-20th century lies
priorities and rotations of truth
Eisenhower, Hibbing, Zimmerman
imaginable at a wall that shouts towards
a religion whose equipment would confuse people.
The great American carnival stepped over
a straight-line playing its instruments
in distillation out of Greenwich Village
early sixties ferocious, exotic/rustic
the Alan Lomax scene
its beatniks and bespectacled crack-ups
unloading an avant-garde’s version
in the occasional film of Fellini, diverse coffee
Walt Whitman, Poe.
In this way concepts are affirmed
by acute musicians, partially idiosyncratic
cooking their jambalaya of extreme commentaries
in excited winged buicks, singing like connoisseurs.
While we proved we were laconic
as the race for the centre chased away reflection.
Our hero soon observed the fantasy
though the excesses couldn't be remembered
fetishes of folkiedom, authenticity, ragamuffins
the seductive obvious.
Confused in the great creeds of things:
Beatles, Godard, Mick Jagger, Abbie Hoffman
and laying down conditions
for the superstar decade, he resisted storms
of the interior as a traditional musician at the cliff.
He was car wrecked, true, a man of family
spokesman/martyr to crystals of the sun
the luminous fog swam in around.
Didn’t we joke of St. Dylan
sublime, apprehensive, bumped up against
the academy
grumpily behind the disturbance
the new persona of America.
He imprinted himself, the devastator
feather/spring, a recent voice with grain
a literary device, landslide in a motel
hurricane, grizzled old Bob.
Pressures were taunting what we were
blonde informs blonde, grinding appetites
emitting light of a beginning language
dream of youth or future Baez angels
(appears she was far too inaccessible
despite a frequent taste of him).
That I’m still alive, desires learned by note
the heart of the cover album
the 1960s straw looking for needles
sending discussion packing with ‘Tarantula’
temporary writing, vowels cut
with authority or luck.
‘It wasn't my moment of history anymore,’
from the hard words we now get
the crackle of Britney – onwards!
History’s punishable when a public becomes
indifferent, giving approximately two hoots.
Now, see the magical exhibition
the veteran carny, here’s his schtick
still rolling …
with change rolling, thunder struck
a series of dreams made near the ore
of north country ranges
outside the first Greyhound station
whose roads walked down where sun glints upon
all our temporary shade,
your ghosting still warm.
And me, still here.
Poems on this page © Jill Jones 2005-2006.
Jill Jones's latest books are her fifth book,Broken/Open (Salt, 2005),
and the chapbooks Fold Unfold (Vagabond, 2005), Where the Sea Burns (Picaro,
2004) and Struggle and Radiance: Ten Commentaries (Wild Honey Press,
2004). In 2003 her fourth full-length book,
Screens, Jets, Heaven: New and Selected Poems, won the Kenneth
Slessor Poetry Prize.
She is currently involved in a number of collaborative projects. They
include the DiVerse series of readings at galleries and museums in
Sydney and c-side, presented as electrolounge events at the 2003 This is
Not Art festival in Newcastle and the 2004 Live Bait festival at Bondi.
She has collaborated with photographer Annette Willis on a number of
projects, including c-side and also Sea Shadow Land Light, a multimedia
presentation first delivered at the On the Beach conference in Fremantle
in 2004. With Michael Farrell, she co-edited a selection of Australian
erotic poetry for a 2003 edition of Slope online magazine.
