Flagging Down Time

Flagging Down Time
by Jill Jones

Five Islands Press, Wollongong, 1993

What critics said about Flagging Down Time:

"one of the most exciting voices in contemporary Australian poetry ... a rich layering of image and idea, an archaeology of fiercely intellectual, and poignantly vulnerable insight and juxtaposition ..." Rose Lucas, Australian Women's Book Review

"With 'Flagging Down Time', Jill Jones strengthens her reputation as one of those poets who is beginning to move Australian poetry into new directions - towards a greater trust than ever in the poet's own responses, a quietening of judgemental implications, and a desire to be able to articulate positive emotion, to find ways of exploring the rhapsodic." Martin Langford, Southerly

"... complex and intelligent. ... This is considered, controlled, speculative poetry ..." David Gilbey, Linq

The Five Islands Press website can be found at www.5islands.1earth.net

Some poems from Flagging Down Time.

There's knowledge and then the sky

Toothpaste and very cold water, fresh and mundane,
I'm on my way under clouds
which don't let anything escape
(you have to deal with it).
Leading my imaginary life down this street again,
onto this dirty living main road.
I may be slow, I may be untrue,
but I won't be a casualty even against the lights,
my fatal flaw could be my imagination.
I can't contact you so I imagine
where you might be as the day
continues spinning up into me -
this should just be experience
with "me" the continuous present
but I've always taken history too seriously.
Cafes are looming, crowded in worship
of coffee and the Saturday papers.
The sky is drained, chilled grey
except at the edge of vision,
even splashy electric colours
of pink and green are muted,
but streets run with people, crowds never stop
extracting money from the wall
where you learn to face the truth -
a stew of senses boiling
as dogs weave maps in and around us,
claw at our rubbish, spilt and split.
I begin punctuating these common visions, maiming them,
my hand against the cool steel of the traffic signal,
I dissect my feelings - hunger, anticipation, boredom -
my mind warm and bloody with it all.
A woman in a beehive sings an aria
that others shoulder off, hoping they don't hear,
preferring to discover old friends at street corners.
Extraordinary things happen in ordinary ways,
a thousand people within range,
breathing in minutely different ways.
I still haven't crossed the road,
waiting at the intersection of imagination and desire,
growing wings thinking of you
waking somewhere.

The desert

These settings of slow landscape change are characterised by
the survival of forms inherited from the past.
- J.A. Mabutt in Australia: A Geography (D.N. Jeans, ed.)

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
on straight, never-ending roads,
wants nothing to do with rain,
not even a sudden flash flood.
But climbing dunes reworked by wind
she finds traces of running water,
fresh scouring of ground, rilled surfaces,
ephemeral stream channels.

She wants to learn to live
without comfort or knowledge
of the future, each day its own,
stretched out like any other.
There's only a long horizon,
she wants that secret to stay there.

She's like plants at ground level
surviving as seeds through dry periods -
tough outside while inside
she'll grow the grassland of dreams,
a wild place of her own,
until rain memory tracks her waking.
She stumbles out by the highway,
into a new mirage, oasis -
that road where past and future meet
only at the horizon
and there's all that walking in between.

from Eleven fifteen

"There's no such thing as an innocent day."
She laughs, her throat's vibration could raise a gale,
stripping plains of soil in the Horn of Africa.
Even bright days, on which I'd pour wonder,
are clouded, the ozone leaking like rumours.
If we fall into dreams, or we're pushed,
then wake, untangle from a film of sheets -
percale, satin, leaves, newsprint, rain -
we can't believe there's innocence in the air,
a new kind of poverty to be afraid of the sun.

Each day is made as each day is bought,
you've been given your choice, paper in pocket,
dole cheque, investment bond, last of the royalties,
but first grope's for coffee, last of the milk, say
"I'm trying to decide how I will spend the day".

I'm trying to decide how I will spend the day,
forget about night which of late has blown out
to a huge emptiness I fill with movies, fantasies
which take on a stranger syntax as I travel
through the midnight hour that has always stood
like a dark faery nought, round zero of change,
possibility of death - nowadays perhaps
the maw of a black hole in the psyche.
But really I'm restless, not as bound as I've been
to flickering film noir, big sleep, long goodbye.

I'm thinking about tomorrow, how the day will open
and the lists I'm making definitely aren't poetry,
if they look like it, I'll make sure no-one finds them.
I've written deliberately on scraps with a leaky pen.
They go together with what must be thrown away.

"They go together with what must be thrown away,
all of them, the unnecessary heaped in with the garbage,"
she tells me. Her unnecessaries look like old calendars,
keys to doors which may no longer exist.
Laughing now, she pulls apart her tip of paper nostalgia,
yellow and brittle. Letters, cards, photos become
the actual golden days, old friends hoarded, forgotten.
Something there can't be burnt or thrown out -
no substance, but a faint trace across nerve endings,
a smile, a whisper still with the power to wake.

It's a different remembering that also allows
a new outline around someone who, till now,
wavered in memory, slid off curling photographs,
a new line that shows up gaps and depths and
if I have the telephone number, I could still call.

If I have the telephone number, I could still call.
These days I use directory assistance more and more,
learn to trace lines, possibilities in ways more accurate.
My straight arrow, desire to hear your voice, speak
those things again, conversation we held fast, let slip
ten years ago, one of those nights of huge, yearning,
important emptiness. Time stands still in the kitchen,
the clock's battery dead, it's been eleven fifteen for days.
So you see I'm sceptical, I've taken so long to call you,
but my finger, though crooked, touches the numbers.

Three things I remember: you had given up smoking
but still you seemed to be sucking up the air,
to possess again the exploding rose; we never touched
except in brief goodbye to our huge empty night;
it was our desire made it much more than important.

Copyright Jill Jones

Updated 17 October 2004