A Version of the New Arcadia
Chaff blocks spread and decompose
over summer, autumn, into winter;
reseeding selves, adjusted slightly
to the area, like sentimentality.
Remember. Red-capped robins appeared
on seeding mounts of broccoli,
the reserve filled with jam tree
sandwiched between allotments;
pink and greys, little corellas,
set in the blooded evening—
we don't realise what we miss,
a swirl of bats, rapid tactics,
buzz and multiply as touchpaper,
night sparks when you see
what you hear only, this dimness,
hairs in ears as wide as membranes
floating in hearsay; the soil
soft with weekend rains
rabbits have tested, not echidnas—
no evidence of nosing,
even in the groundline
of termite-eaten stumps,
quarrelsome, tetchy evening hangers-
on as spread statistics
will never hold up as pure nostalgia,
having laid on scheme water and power
and buried an access road
into the title deed, up close,
to watch and almost block out
the overwhelming flock,
just the insects interrupting
purity of chaos theories
as random as caught is not,
precise acidwork in digestion,
the bats come maybe down
from rifts in the mountain,
where planes fly too close
and fate is either "one day",
or subsumed in inevitability.
Love to air: gnat, mosquito
flitting we might say drifting
with just enough warmth
left after day, to draw blood
from inside bat, silhouettes
sonic in thin light, until radical
the flock pours in plumes and billowings,
canvas flapping furiously on canvas,
all metaphors and similes
associated with the rapid movement
of water over rocks, reefs,
just the swell conflicted
and yet of the same flesh,
the prominent tree struck
against the mountain—bats
blinded momentarily by destruction
of silence. And this to darken
the house, paddocks,
granite bones of the reserve.
Crop Duster
It is the noun behind the action
that wrecks the choral work,
stiff breeze across drought-tweaked
ears of wheat charged with late rains,
aerofoils catching and sweeping
aquatic, harmonic exhalations
of scrub and pathways
that survey undulations; for here
the crop duster, sharp single-seater
with gull wings displaying,
ballet parody, stench of poison
imposing the shadow of a suppressive
kiss: cape tulip a legacy
on uncropped surface,
serial movements of emblematic parrots
escorting, switching at low-level
transfer stations, to bind the journey;
crop duster, aerial sprayer, farm-acology
mapped in the iris, as if seeing clouds
of spray billow out will necessarily
suggest a bitter odour, ingestion,
despite the wind blowing
in the opposite direction,
and we in our porous skins,
moving fast and further away.
Redneck Refutation
I didn't connect regardless
how much I participated, it's a vocab thing
though not to do with skills of expression;
ejecting bullets
from the breech, freezing whole carcasses
of home-slaughtered sheep, the contradictions
roll the same roads, and families
still come to visit:
crops in the bush, sullen days
coming down off bad speed, scoring from the old bloke
shacked up with teenage girls,
his bull terrier
crunching chickens;
a flat in the city is a deal
that can go either way, and the economics
of the paddock are the call-girl's profit;
the ford fairmont
runs against the speed camera, and blind grass
poisons sheep—sightless like the minister
amongst his flock,
the school teacher,
the father
who won't let his son play netball because it will turn him,
like an innocent bitten by a vampire, into a pervert—or worse—
a poofter. Outside, you can't know that those
who speak in short, inverted sentences
always have fences in a state of disrepair,
line length
and wire length are directly proportional,
eloquent subdivider of land, intensive pig farmer,
will let nothing in or out, though the space around the pig-shed
is large and open, mainly used for hay cutting
while all sons play Guns 'n' Roses' Appetite for Destruction,
timeless classic... apotheosis, serrated road edge
where a termite mound astoundingly remains intact: there
are no generics, no models of behaviour.
It's not that my
name is a misnomer: it's who owns
a particular conversation.
(c) 2005 by John Kinsella. All rights reserved.
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