Jane Frank – Incantation

Download PDF Here

Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025

Incantation, poems by Jane Frank.

---

Incantation

I don’t know the name of the beach
where I’m standing: there’s a giddiness
of the world being new again,
anything possible, and a tiny theft
of pleasure like anticipation when
I know the sun will reemerge
from behind clouds strewn above
the bolt of zaffre water, across amber-
leaf mangrove rooftops.
An incantation
of salt tongues and I wonder if this
mud-stained circle is where crabs
meet? The tide is at crossover
and there’s a feeling of time running
out—it happens a lot lately even
when the sea isn’t ebbing—
in the distance, the Glasshouse
Mountains are turning from phthalo
to mauve.
I imagine tonight’s stars
of iron pyrite reflected in this polished
passage of ocean, the thin beach curve
of sand and shingle drowned black.
Emotions are messages to the muscles
and I walk, notice calligraphic people
sitting under lazy eucalypts—
some tightly scribbled, hard-pressed,
others formed of bouncing tendrils
that escape their outlines.
At a bend
in the path, a man stands at an easel
painting a landscape in time-bomb
strokes and I know I must return
to the car, to the bridge, to the mainland.
Pure colours are separated by zones
of uncertainty and I wonder if this day
is the middle of eternity, at its end
or just at the very start? Reading
my thoughts, two pelicans glide
beneath the stippled cotton trees,
perch on the pale shore.

---

Palm Reading

All the blue paintings she has ever seen along an avenue of quiet
dusk colours dipping soft beneath the trees
the faint Morse code
of insects calling from cabbage palms
and steel-tipped Bismark palms
and Canary Island date palms
with invisible high tufts lost in haze
each progressively smaller
across the enamel of night that’s beginning to fall
with its grit of regret

Flowers in every garden stare back white
or a Wedgewood interpretation of it:
plumbago, magnolia, stephanotis over gateways
between the endless street
and the abstracted lives,
occasional faceless people floating
above their gabled rooftops
with bouquets of lilac and green
calming babies or cradling family pets

She doesn’t regard the road closely or even remember
the blister yellow brassiness of the morning
but wonders what these creatures of suburbia
find in her face
in her walking here,
in the way she’s beginning to slip from sight

It is the palms that read her thoughts:
the far ones are outfielders against distant picket fences
that might not even be real
but close ones mop the sky
push puddles of stars into corners
so what was written—an inventory of what matters
that she couldn’t absorb in time—
vanishes

---

Tigers in Cambridge

It’s not the spires that stay with you
but the houses
floating in gardens like boats, the sky

roughly under-painted blue, shells
and their rowers
over-decorated in garish sun, river falling—

swelling—like breath, dragonfly buzzing
an intermittent static
in your head. In the park, tigers lurk

in cherry trees, trunks striped black, leaves
daubed in single strokes
unattached to twigs or branches, deranged

amber eyes. Later, on the road north,
a perfunctory call
from a lonely phone box and beyond it,

a view of hell: rainbows arched across
an infinity
of wheat fields, the distant hills open cages.

---

© 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.