Jane Frank – Wild Birds, Eagle Junction

Farnk LE P&W 4 Nov-Dec 2024

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four November-December 2024

Wild Birds, Eagle Junction, poems by Jane Frank.


Wild Birds, Eagle Junction

after Georges Braque’s Oiseaux, 1962

The wild birds all leave my mind at once when the train moves
from the platform.

I lose myself in the archipelago of colour that is the city sun-
wrapped in its river, think to myself

that if I travelled on this train every day, threading the suburbs
on a line like beads,

it might stop the birds from nesting & the mornings might be light,
whipped like buttercream.

I try not to notice the wild birds through the window as they soar
over the arc of the bridge

in their low, elegant formations but everything is easier at a distance.
The train sways as if plunging underwater

& my head is drained empty, only the gentle notifications
about approaching stations

& which side to disembark. They will be waiting for me
at my destination

—the wild birds— they will ruffle their feathers against my thoughts
as I walk home against a flat sky.


Dream Birds

Birds rehearse songs in their sleep
like she practices kissing, their wings twitching
in time with the soft movement of her lips.

It is always birds in her dreams: zebra finches
& whip birds & brush turkeys that build nests
among her garden ferns by day but wear the faces of people.

The exhilaration of flight & the overwhelm of distance
means her brain is alight with positive & negative
sensations all at once [pink + blue = a dull aubergine purple:

a code for quietly existing] but all the time she knows
that her dreams are cave walls or skies where words
can be scratched in ochre chalk or dabbed with cloud,

where strange imaginations beat against the bones
of her being & that mostly, it is a migrating bird that visits—
one eye open, one closed—whispering instructions

for how to dream across thousands of miles
between hemispheres & she wonders if that bird
conjures her in turn, grounded beneath blankets & sheets

but with an avian face & feathers, also caught
between two lives, if the best of her, too,
belongs in the starry arena between places,

whether love burns its brightest
in the parallel lives
of the night?


Unfastening

Distant plovers
and crow song — close —
a field of dew like snow
beneath roughed up clouds
I am always surveying
the scene at the same time
as being who I am now
where passion and outrage
are in detached floating boxes
that I can see shining
in an egg shell sky
a long way off
past the black-framed windows
and above the dome-shaped
hill and furrowed farms
where each macadamia nut tree
is a tiny calligraphy mark
on the morning that must
mean something
I look
from that agricultural cuneiform
to the letters on the page:
different stories—none
particularly mine.


© Jane Frank

Brisbane poet Jane Frank’s debut collection of poetry is Ghosts Struggle to Swim, published by Calanthe Press in 2023 and she is author of two previous chapbooks. Her poetry has been widely published in Australia and overseas in publications including Westerly, Cordite, Meniscus, Antipodes, The Ekphrastic Review, Shearsman, Poetry Ireland Review and Takahe. She is Reviews Editor for StylusLit Literary Journal and teaches in Communication and Creative industries at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

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