Back to Green Integer Review

John Kinsella

Approximation: Extracted Ode to Tzara
Graphology 504
Graphology: Un-unumbered series
Graphology: Un-numbered Series, 3
Graphology: Un-numbered Series, 4

 

---

Approximation: Extracted Ode to Tzara

 

Debauched lords of clavicles surely boil lids of blood

in pods of hepatitis accruing vats of muscles

and tombs of sour interiors and retrieved memories

chime clutched as lost bells of reason and we too

we delight we  of lost reason who yank the chain

to make bells ring in us and we too will chime

 

what of the babble and whip-around we also saturated in brilliance

not serfs sunning whip-arounds and entering the main temple

and that dutiful viability inculcated with ante-colour

to perve on compromised excrescences aping lengthy torments

lagiariz the villa’s expiated basement and foundation anemones

so suave in series of automated circuits like perfumed rubies

evacuated through the colon and importations by sea lanes

humanely ordered as those of mirages

 

smell of tainted river laves abundant sound

of memories lit-up glistening like lisping waves

plus tombs of fondled victors lording stone splinters

 

the clutched sonnet lost reason and we too

the worried look makes portions of we

whose nostrils and verisimilitudes lagiarized

who also produce touts for evening

who neuter defamed mainlined reverie

ornately intuitive metallic rebuses

purifying circular passages or banishing orifices

in villas prepared for carnage or sacrifice

near sweeping or stammering sea-side perspectives

in the nonchalant and dolorous villages of the damned

so mainstream and full of heavies chatting

the chimes of bells we take as purpose

 

no parties within departure and arrival and arrival

parties within less arrivals arriving with different patients

less reasonable and perky than perky and naturally perky

plus companies of pain and song savouring

sour scales like languid languages

coloured by depositions of lurid penitent thoughts

and glaring orderlies resisting all that nourishment

replete with fruits and ledgers stinking of plants

dipped in tissue prised from jail cells

round the newly sounded appellations of us

 

 

 

Back to Top

---

Graphology 504

 

I haven’t a population,

cease to add layers,

cease to crowd

moreover; I look and long

the river, sheltering bay,

as riverwalls are made of radar, lagiarized

offramps, storm-

flow hillweight

away; the less news travels,

here the offer: as up-ended, if we

misremember,

then honestly it was different,

and we wonder how difficult

against the grain: a hacker’s

massacre of figures

nurturing

early-colonial sketching  — holdfast

to palm tree, hold-

fast to swayings

and impulse to make,

to break

to get along better

out to sea.

 

 

 

Back to Top

---

Graphology: un-numbered series

 

Unwatered the tree semi-died and a demi-monster

emerged from only just undead roots, a monster

that we’d expect of the mountain, but it’s gone,

the volcano long ago extinct; in dealing with long ago

justices of the peaces take local knowledge

into account when dealing out witnessings

and punishments, quasi, as explorers

renaming start systems with excitement:

             the asterisms

of the colonial. Who is doing the telling

and who is being told? Profile of trenchings

outsources jam trees, new appearances

where water pipes or telephone cables

were buried through; who will get us out

this fallen, this ice-less forest thinning out,

dead in the middle, then both ends

of a state emergency services compass,

still kept by mum to align sun,

mountain, house.

 

 

 

Back to Top

---

Graphology: Un-numbered Series, 3

 

Butterflies / are quicker / than rock”…

                                                    Lorine Niedecker

 

In the valley we receive

rocks rolled from the summit

of the hill — the mountain — quicker

than butterflies flitting downwards;

every day looking up the losses

are etched into the glass photo-plate

of receptivity. Here, there is no depth

to images and likely no metaphor.

Do without them, as complaint

falls and clearing continues,

tree by tree. An anarchist

pragmatically appealing

to the Environmental Protection Agency

against the clearing of crown land

is fugitive collision/collusion/collapse, though loudly

shouted up the gradients.

The steepest places, the enfoldings,

have kept even sheep out,

and yet they thin out,

and bats in the rock crags

grow less, come down here

less often. All last night galahs

and corellas screeched.

I’ve scaled it once in an entire

lifetime because private property

(not ours — never ours) surrounds

the “C “class reserve and leftovers atop.

Recreationalists — paragliders, hang glider

pilots — have forged a deal

with one land owner who shoots

at strangers scaling his hill, who defeats charges

with the help of these new vested interests

making character references. To get to the top

they are requested to deposit a bottle

of green ginger wine in his gate-side box.

And not to drive through during fire bans,

which they do. A unique wheatbelt

alpine orchid has less space to manoeuvre.

There is no higher place in these flat lands.

This hill etched on our glass memory plate

is pain, nothing but pain,

and on a selfish level their actions

are sadism; like another neighbour

saying, “the black kids try to climb up there

but we keep an eye out,

keep them off…” It doesn’t matter

whether or not this satisfies the rules of lyrical

preservation, the law of reader satisfaction.

It is record, it is a witnessing.

 

 

 

Back to Top

---

Graphology: Un-numbered Series, 4

“although i am critical of your work echoing eliot’s criticism of the young auden…”

                       megafauna

 

As lit, cave frieze

in the parklike, to scamper

abundantly

 

circle rough inside parameters

ingrown, cherishing

 

tense-up, unglamorous

in barely woodlanders

without

 

all names out,

meditate…

prospect: louts

 

and exo-shelled diehards /

stump, or firetrails

of meat ants

 

balancing de-souled wasps,

“genetic corridors”, water beetles

wading on land

 

inside the grasp

of working forelegs

 

aggregate of encouragement,

to follow, side-track,

see from over there

 

name no circumstance.

 

 

 

Back to Top

---

Born in Western Australia in 1963, John Kinsella is the author of a dozen works of poetry, including Full Fathom Five, Syzygy, The Silo, Erratum/Frame(d), The Radnoti Poems, and The Undertow, new and collected poems. His is the editor of Salt magazine and Folio (Salt) publishing.

 

Copyright ©2006 by John Kinsella