John Kinsella Poems

We always look back,
attracted by that feeling
of having been there before – the roads
sinking, the soil weeping (scab on scab
...

The smallest measure of matter
leaves traces before it vanishes:
the energy lost or exchanged
in cycling out to Grantchester
...

Winter has little if nothing
To do with it; the first to go
Is the cloched light of the “gulley”,
...

He’s polite looking over the polaroids
saying gee & fantastic, though always
standing close to the warm glow
...

Outflanked by the sheep run, wild oats
dry and riotous, barbed wire bleeding rust
over fence posts, even quartz chunks
...

Dormant are pinnacles and streams of the mountains,
Chasms and bluffs and crawlers fed by the dark earth;
Dormant are wild animals and that tribe of bees
And monsters out of the sea's dark syntax;
Dormant are clans of birds with wings that envelop.
...

It didn't happen in that order—
the endless growl of what will turn out to be
miniature quad and trail bikes, carried along
the top of the valley and rumbling its contents:
small kids with helmets weighing more than their heads,
ragged on by parents with crossed arms and ambition
in their eyes: round and round the drone of fun.
A country pursuit. Tracy tells me a professor
of economics at a local city university
while praising capitalism says he will only
listen to opposition if it comes from one
who eats only lentils, has given up cars
and eschews imported brands of foodstuffs. Lentils?
Contradictions aside, I'll take him on, though
it might be hard to hear me speak above the junior
quad-bike circus performing along the hills. But hark,
I'll tell you something unusually usual: at dusk
wandering the block with Katherine we came across
shreds of chemical-pink balloon with plastic string
attached to its tied-off umbilical cord, clearly
an escapee from a party, the child—her name
decorating the balloon with three crosses for kisses—
in tears, chasing it up into the sky, watching
it drift over the hills, her letter to the world
a single word and her mark made over. Katherine
asks if I recall the balloons her class back in England
released with school name and address and how one
floated all the way over the Channel and on to Belgium
where another child picked up the shreds and deciphered
the message and wrote back; weather balloons, "hopes
and ambitions" as Delmore says, but without doubt
or skepticism, in full expectation they will land
somewhere far away and bring joy to the finder.
I throw the shred of balloon away, fearing
an animal crossing the block in the dark,
night-eyed and keenly sampling the ground
and the air with its snout, will reread or misread
the code of chemical pinkness, and like some Red
Riding Hood in reverse, choke on the gift of chance.
...

The Angry God of  This World & His Throne in Purgatory

Fog day, give us the sun. But the particulate
hangover from Stuttgart's bad days obscures.
The weather of modernity. The lady's tattooed

musculature is what comes of getting too close
to the angry father. Decode. He'd been left behind.
We get on well now. Punk diadem, scales unjust,

iced and fired, messianic Virgil and the golden
aspiration for one wandering around in diaphanous
red, the zoo escapees looking on hungrily

but nervously. And a little bit curious. Even
at the height of Coondle heat when I rose before
dawn to catch the sun's origins I realized I was

looking into the core of purgatory. The house
would stretch and crack with heat but then, as the sun
played its games with the horizon, the curve of the hill,

the house was at its coolest and retracted so a glass pane
shattered into the corridor. The conspiracy of good
and bad. Who is to choose? I don't mind the walk,

negotiating rough ground, but when jerks are taking
potshots at you, it makes it impossible. I don't use
a GPS. A bit of bush knowledge, a lot of common sense.

But this is Tübingen and we're nearing our time:
the songbird insurgence and weather vanes and swans,
the bare branches and killed trees, the welcome

and hatred of refugees, questions of which fruit will
ripen or mature or fall or offer seed when its time comes.
I study Hölderlin manuscripts with a friend and we will

rewrite "Half of Life" upside down. The inversions
of travel and temporariness and permanence. Tracy
speaks to me from across the old town. It hasn't rained

today but the Ammer River is still swift outside
this window. Classic. Stock epithet burnout.
Behind the glissade of faces the goings home.

Vengeance lurks therein. Such beautiful youth.
Floating on Friday night promise. This brutal God
watching on. In store. Adorning places of worship.

I apologize for the distractions. Wondering while I write.
...

You've got to understand that sighting the pair
of eagles over the block, right over our house,
not more than twenty feet above the roof,
so massive their wings pull at the corrugated
tin sheeting even with gentlest tilt, counteracts
bitterness against all the damage I see and hear
around me on an exclusively crisp blue morning,
when clarity is pain and even one small missing
wattle tree, entirely vanquished since I was last here
at home—I still find this hard to say—is agony;
a region is not a pinpoint and a different compass
works in my head, having magnetics for all
directions and all pointing to one spot
I know and observe as closely as possible;
and even one small vanished or vanquished
wattle tree is agony close to death for me,
where I find it hard to breathe to feed myself
to get past the loss; but the pair of eagles
still appearing and keeping their sharp
and scrupulous eyes honed, overrides
this ordeal, though I wish their victims
life too and their damage is traumatic
as anything else; that's as much sense
or nonsense as I can make in such blue light.
...

Lichen glows in the moonlight
so fierce only cloud blocking
the moon brings relief. Then passed by,
recharged it leaps up off rocks

and suffocates—there is no route
through rocks without having to confront
its beseeching—it lights the way,
not the moon, and outdoes epithets

like phosphorescent, fluorescent, or florescent:
it smirks and smiles and lifts the corner
of its lips in hideous or blissful collusion,
and birds pipe an eternal dawn, never knowing

when to sleep or wake. They might
be tricked into thinking their time's up,
in the spectrum of lichen, its extra-gravital
persuasion, its crackling movement

remembered as still, indifferent, barely
living under the sun, or on a dark night;
climbing up you'd escape, but like all great
molecular weights it leaves traces

you carry with you into the realms
of comfort and faith.
...