| Trapped inside the cavity of my body
there is only and always twilight;
mallee scrub is like the hair that grows externally,
and through gravelly soil
something like blood runs.
Absolute faith
leaves a blank, though tension
still cramps the heart and ties the gut in knots;
jam tree is a hardwood
good for fence-posts and weapons; cut, it is sweetly
redolent.
A piano player tolls, senses
replayed. After fire has ruptured
scrub and singed wandoo and powderbark,
winged wattle colonizes again
into granitic soils, jam tree is there
as we are there: fire through cemeteries,
backing through soil to seal all as one grave,
deliverance coeval with soil density.
Replete
with interaction, the dead
can almost afford to move around
but tend to stay, wars and incidents of violence
moving through them like pollen, crushing
red bonnets flowering almost profusely.
My
speech
is dribble from the snottygobble’s foliage,
its anchor only in name or language
as a whole: a defining moment
like those who have something extracted by customs
and placed in quarantine,
this sickly sample,
tossed up in the driving waves of heat,
mercy pressed in sandy soil
by explorers who’ve
claimed precedent. |
John Kinsella is author of twenty books, including The Hunt (a
Poetry Book Society recommendation), The Undertow: New & Selected
Poems (Arc, UK), and The Hierarchy of Sheep (Bloodaxe/FACP,
2001). He is the editor of the international literary journal Salt,
a consultant editor to Westerly (CSAL, University of Western
Australia), co-editor of the British literary journal Stand,
international editor of the American literary journal The Kenyon
Review, and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. His new and
selected poems, selected and introduced by Harold Bloom, is due out from
W. W. Norton in fall 2004. |
