Whispers And Courses
By Jill Jones
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.
But wind gives the day its wings, invisible
from this window. And makes space
for light more clear than freshest water,
more bright than silvered glass.
The course of leaves and sound becomes
a float, a feather-delicate scrape. Each tree
hands on whispers. They translate through
lane corridors into a constant hushing —
catch on squatting walls, arrow-headed fences.
Like our concepts tracking what we think
should be in or outside — domains
of rocky edges, worlds of grass.
All suburban geometry, all below the bed
of sky: pacific today, sometimes stormy.
However each day wakes, how it rides.
And how far we bend to catch its sound.
My horizon is a measure of this present.
Continues its hours while I seek others.
And crisp yellow light squares some time
on paving, dry as summer rain.
A jet’s hard silver and withdrawing roar
says something nearly loud as absolute
of a further world, its borders, hungers, war.
And the trees reply by standing ground.
And what of a moon I leave stranded there
out with the sun, dreaming other dreams?
Of places perhaps without sleep, grounds
of fire without hope, or even an hour’s rest.
Far-off blizzards, lava, a planet language
of ancient hollows, old sockets in stone.
Alive alongside deliriums of power,
and nights filled with missiles and eternity.
We’ve no big weather here, forget blood’s
course can be wild as the crush of cyclones
on coasts. For weeks this hill may live
with indolent light; night storms can please us.
And even here hurts whisper over fences,
life lingers unnecessarily in a bed, mouths fight
and the smallest of deaths go to ground:
a bubble of yolk, the not-yet lived body.
When wind moves, ground receives,
breaks open life in scattered half-shells,
a dove’s lost egg. I find with work’s end
a colder, fuller moon, winter’s promise.
While birds call the dark, the smell of rain
drifts across the greying fence. Sun leaves
the sky its brief evening pink to night
and the relief of our half-blind hours.