Jill Jones

She's learning about the desert
where things are not as flat as they seem.
She needs the plain, the wind, scrub,
no longer believes mirages
...

Without roots and prefiguring
the shaping of ferns
bronze bright in the sun cleft
along a wet fault line
...

I have put my hand out to the word.
It’s been there for days. Hovering
between the newspaper and the television.
...

You’ve heard this story before –
becoming unravelled in Europe
or assaulted in some roadhouse
but bold as nipples and booted.
...

Fifteen minutes at the autobank, waiting for money,
and the nations stroll by with their children
and the new languages.
So many words for Saturday and shopping,
...

The snow was in the sun
There was a prick in garden
A truck jack-knifed the particulars
There was a smell of old gas
...

Where are your eyes?
Nothing has prepared us for this.
...

January soaks the hill with white sky
grass writes into blood and a river of heat sings

Music loads the morning with legends
...

The way you turn at night toward me
so I take your breath across my face, then
away. And I breathe you, back bare
as a beautiful open country, pale surface
...

To move slowly at the bench
and cupboards of a lit-up kitchen,
to watch a woman do this
and then walk on. To turn
...

Night’s sheet
weighs heavy
bearing the safety
of sleep
...

But to learn all there is in a street.
To treat the suburb’s noise as another lesson.
The amazement of traffic. Or celebrate
small terrors that balloon from locks and veins.
...

Mother about the letters i never wrote
the sirens outside batter my heart
and the fact i don't eat enough food
reminding me i am hungry
...

The night is kind tonight,
the sky is purple,
clouds are orange,
and planes fly away
...

They're restructuring reality again
but you have to sit and wait your turn
the transfers have been coming down for weeks
and another truckload of files
...

A hazy field
rain cast plummeting
plunge of stone hallways
to our bed’s name
...

This is not a poem about dust,
there have been too many of those,
but may be about wind, who knows,
the remaking of deserts, endlessly,
...

Air urges through my waking cells.
Day breathes thicker, houses exhale us.
We people the streets with our week time
dance, impatient with the tinnitus of hours.
...

It's not the birds that are spectres,
they come in afternoon, true,
swing by the air, song-filled passes,
that branches come to ground, falling
...

The traffic begins its wave,
the sky is threaded with exhaust,
the blind man has a ticket, your bag
is heavy today, the traffic is beautiful
...