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CAROL JENKINS
two poems
The Yard
- Beyond the domesticities of grass,
- clothes line and Jacaranda, kero tins
- of thyme and sage, through a gate
- that never closed
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- to the bottle yard’s besieged
passage,
- an eighteen inch width of sand specked
- with darker oxidants, dry adherents
- of stubborn greyness,
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- you get a wriggle on past the stacks
- where heat glint sours residues and
ferments
- dregs in a bottle world dizzy with
- spirit pungents, wine and whiskey
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- interlopers in a landscape ruled by beer,
- a song of slung up percussion played by
- the dozens bottle clashing symphonic
- sway, the syncopated clink and ring
- of one hundred and twenty-one nestled
- empty browns that sing a bright syntax,
- of fast onset, they pitch, slurring over
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- frequency, lilt not quite united
- in their slow-fading empty bottle echo.
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- A block away at school I can sort by ear
- what they’re loading, strictly
- brown for the brewery truck
- greens and special shapes, rate blues
- antique cobalts, iridescent greens with
marble
- stoppered throats opalised by entombment
- disinterred in strange digs, kept
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- for admiration, the children’s prize
- of black and white plastic Scottie dogs.
- I learn fractions by half-penny browns
- - they pay. Take no milk or
- soft drink, in a world of empties
- these run a different scheme
- of deposits and returns.
Winter
Rain
- With the rain falling, winter rain
- metronomic parts of me
- half listen to its cadence, half
- know the ground it maps, pours over
- and across. Rain in numinous strands
- threads the past, the now, the with,
- the recent future, threads exquisite,
- with longing to drink
- all parts of time’s catastrophe,
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- ceiling and roof resonant with thoughts
- of not, and always being, shelter or
homage
- to what can be said of absence, the black
- wet ground, slate cold puddles holding
- some imaginary perfect state
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- and you nudging a boat of memory out
- into the rain, waiting for the boat
- to displace the sea.
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