The photographs fan out of their packet like a rainbow lorikeet’s opening wing. In front of the Chemist, in the middle of Friday suddenly one woman is caught in free-fall. Within her head, louvers open. She is standing in dust-shimmering light -- a flight path through the roof of that rainforest at the back of a house where she lived, once. She is dappled with a warm-earth smell and hours are sliding into her hands like the fruit of the stinging tree -- globes of clear, sweet juice descending in a silver mist of danger through the shadows and the almost-invisibly needled, heart-shaped leaves. She has her feet only just on the concrete as the unexpected harvest splits its skins, memory-dousing her before drying into coloured flakes she can slip so casually back under the flap which promises picnic-perfect happiness … There it is, all the fall and flutter of her life: friends hooded under picnic rugs in rain, umbrellas over the barbecue the children saying Take me to the camera throwing shish-kebabs to currawongs and running through wet ferns, unscathed by ticks and leeches … There it is, in front of the Chemist, in the middle of Friday so airily suspending her until she is thumped back to earth by a neighbour, his arms full of house paint, his Hul-lo! falling neat as an egg into this nest last Saturday has built in her hands. They both laugh -- and her voice is a smoke-edged warble a breath from that barbecue breezing over the little suburb’s pickled street as she fans out the photographs and for one five hundredth of a second they are caught on the spread, stilled feathers of a wing. Jean Kent |
Jean lives at Kilaben Bay, overlooking Lake Macquarie. Her four full-length poetry collections include Travelling with the Wrong Phrasebooks, which she completed during a Residency at the Literature Board’s Keesing Studio, Paris, in 2011. A new book, Silvered Mullet, will be published by Pitt Street Poetry in 2015. For more of her poems and occasional Jottings, visit jeankent.net.au
read more poems by Jean
Click here for audio files of Jean discussing poetry
read more poems by Jean
Click here for audio files of Jean discussing poetry