C’mon, let’s go with our attention depending,
with the ardour of late afternoon’s pink horizon,
its cloud tendril, bird scrawl, and our questing
attachments – ‘there is such beauty’ – but
it’s the ‘such’ that contains a caution about
our exhausted hair or souls or the still sanguine way
we negotiate September’s impatient buds
along the terraces, and our way through
another discussion at a corner, all the busy figures with
swathed loads and tenacity, what choices – a stop/go giggle
or something serious about the quickening splendour
of the road, its corrugations shining, a place indeed
for a hungry soul, or at least destiny full of flare,
where wires hover, machines quiver as if they know
who really owned all of this here, it’s not for you and I,
not even the late shit rolling across the path, plastic
shit with purpose – there was a cost, we missed it –
the tentacles of the program spiral from the mall,
from the phones, ‘it all seems so smooth’, you say,
and what can I reply, what can I gesture at
that’s not the same lie as memory, that’s now in
the program, you say ‘see, even the dresses
watch us, demand something from our bodies’
but I don’t follow your eyes there, I take your hand,
‘c’mon’, I want to say, we can hitch onto a vision
outside the city’s halls, past the parks, the river curves,
past the future to somewhere a bit like this as if
it’s actually intense, routine and baffling like that place
where we go everyday. C’mon, let’s find such
beauty among our bodies and common splendour.
Jill Jones

 

Jill Jones has published eleven books of poetry, and a number of chapbooks. Recent books include Viva the Real (UQP 2018), Brink (Five Islands 2017) and The Beautiful Anxiety (Puncher & Wattmann 2014), which won the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. She is co-publisher, with Alison Flett, of Little Windows Press.

© 2019