Let’s go and get drunk on light again – it has the power to console. Georges Seurat

 

Home…Tiaro…Bauple Mountain…Gootchie
We followed the dots

In the Fairmont. Artists emerged like sprites
from among the gums

You were bronze-skinned and smiled when
I said there was a frog in the loo

I had a small table next to yours, dappled cows
brown and dogs white

You retaped my paper again and again,
said I was a true artiste

We ate corned beef sandwiches wrapped in foil,
tried damper off hot coals

You stood in the shed doorway, sun surfing
corrugations in your hair

And used a fat brush (for hours it seemed)
to daub on the green mountain

You swore a bit when you weren’t sure
if it looked right and then

We drank red cordial from the esky while
that layer dried

You took a fine brush to speckle over ghost
trunks in white bands,

Their shadows dolloped indigo and pink,
sky: yellow, mauve and tan

So the mixing happened with your eyes
not on the palette

And as we drove away, I could still see the
Gootchie bush artists

Through thick dirt, splattered red, little
points of light waving

Jane Frank

 

Jane Frank’s first chapbook was titled Milky Way of Words (Ginninderra Press 2016). A collaborative work – Flotsam – is forthcoming with Flarestack, UK. Most recently, Jane’s poems have appeared in Popshot, Pressure Gauge, Takahē and The Poets’ Republic, and anthologised in Automatic Pilot (2018), The Heroines Anthology (Neo Perennial Press 2018) and Dragons of the Prime (The Emma Press 2018).

© 2018