Tuesday Poem

All Our Seasons

At the kitchen table I made paper dolls

extravagantly dressed, cotton wool fur edging

their green crepe skating dresses –

ice waltzes in a landscape so far from the mango tree -

my ship’s lookout – and the couch grass

of our backyard. A fragile succession of Charlottes

and Beths danced through winter seasons and on

to summer, water-colour stained empire frocks,

all out of historical whack,

until I packed them up for the colonies,

quoits and romance on the deck

of the sixties laminex, and at the other end,

the tea, the buttered white bread.

There are four cloth doll heads

smiling in a bowl at the flea market.

I touch each in turn, buy velvet ribbon,

a powder compact,

gilt slightly rubbed,

and some silky stuff that once

I’d have plaited and twisted into a knot

for Charlotte’s coming out.

Hey, queen of the kitchen kingdom

in your summer palace

waltz with me – 
your lead.

I never left you behind

we are always the same story

all our fragile seasons.

Catherine Bateson, 2013.

Check out the Tuesday Poem at the Tuesday Poem hub - this week, guest edited by me! It's a poem by award-winning Australian poet, Jill Jones. It's a powerful poem and I admire the way it skirts narrative, something I find trouble doing, clearly. I was going to offer a handmade haiku lino-print card  all the way from Paris to the first person who commented on both this blog and the Tuesday Poem blog - who knows I still might.

Tuesday Poem - 'Dream Horses' by Jill Jones

Dream Horses

Where are your eyes?

Nothing has prepared us for this.

What is earth?

There’s a pain that remembers bone and horn.

Is the sky above?

Only figures in a landscape.

How fast is the wind?

Even the broken floats in dreamland’s waters.

Do you remember when?

You will know when you see us.

Will you take us with you?

Born into the boundless plain.

How long have you been here?

Our names were once Surefoot and Swift.

Do you think we will be happy?

Dream horses do not need your eyes.

 – after ‘Clay Horses’ by Sidney Nolan

Jill Jones, from Fold Unfold, Vagabond Press, 2005.

I love ekphrastic poetry but I do think it's difficult to always get right, so the poem works on the page without the reader necessarily knowing the artwork it references. To me 'Dream Horses' works without the reader knowing the Sidney Nolan artwork. I love this poem's oblique mysteries. Jones says of her own work:

I’m working somewhere between the lyric and something more broader, more discursive, so I move from either investigations of interiority or sensuality merged with the figurative which may also speak to larger structures. The poems have become a broken song – fragmented, flagrant, floating - perhaps an abstract or ruined lyric, where ‘I’ has shifted from the centre.

Jill Jones currently lives in Adelaide, Australia. Her work has been published  in most of the leading literary periodicals in Australia as well as in a number of print and online magazines in New Zealand, Canada, the USA, Britain, the Czech Republic, France and India. She has had six full-length collections published. More information about Jones can be found here and you can follow her blog here.

'Dream Horses is reproduced here with permission from the poet.