Two Poems

Andy Jackson

All things pass through you

A good life. A good death. Words said too easily, as if a body could be measured or possessed. All things pass through you—the waving feathers of a car-struck parrot, the yes-yes-yes of frogs as the night rises again, the open-wound sinkholes of silence in this country, the wail of drones slicing through the air above another continent, earworms, data, particulate matter, the light, this merciless light—and you are not left untouched. Your eyelids and fingers twitch as you dream. Little ghosts inhabit your lungs, skin and blood, your memories and ideas. They stain and bless.

after the digital drawing & collage of the same name by Rachael Wenona Guy

You speak clouds

Asked how you are, you speak clouds. Or erasures. In the pages of your diary, flakes of ash, a drift of full stops. Your blackened hands fidget. Asked your name, you turn to the window, thinking of elsewhere. The absurd, handsome face of the Christmas Island Frigatebird. The keen yellow eyes of the Western Swamp Tortoise. Such losses, beyond you and close. It’s like they say; makes it harder, the more you love. Your hair in the sink. Nights awake, listening. Body adrift. Asked what’s on your mind, you open your arms, as if to say, this, all of this.

after the digital drawing & collage of the same name by Rachael Wenona Guy

the phrase “makes it harder, the more you love” is from the song “The Watershed” by Mark Hollis

ANDY JACKSON is a disabled poet, creative writing teacher at the University of Melbourne, and a Patron of Writers Victoria. His latest poetry collection is Human Looking, which won the ALS Gold Medal and the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry. He writes and rests on Dja Dja Wurrung country.