John Kinsella
Canto of the Inner Lining

If I’ve got it right, the church power
is subterranean, and differing denominations
cluster at nodal points, junctures

of power robbed or scuttled from elsewhere:
science fictionists, speculatives, occultists
have long savvied this: who am I in their

urban flurries, restaurants and numbered streets,
fed on produce, fed on product, fed on raw
materials like iron ore and knowledge:

entrepots, sly grog depots, ice in insulin
disposal units: free trade of secrets: all the white
witches I know cast hexes, graffiti

bordered-up houses, make moon-faces
on vacant blocks; they know the dwellings
infested with termites, rodents, spiders,

they know which couples take weekends
at country houses; travesti: forced out
into masculine apartments, watched

through curtain cracks, stereos overplaying
and the intensity of clutter zapping brain cells;
my guide is my body, taut in jeans and t-shirt,

bent over before silver screens with weak-eyed
projectors, fading… I am none of the personalities,
this independent researcher pegging away

to make great the collective conscience: bits
missing from the jigsaw added daily, as rapid
as immolation; what strand of hair, what fluid

spilt on a door handle, bathroom, shop floor,
pins us to the pathology: walking beneath
convict-built prisons, polishing objects

in sacristy, compiling street names and success
stories: most influential people in the State,
emotion eroding public institutions

as if there’s money to burn: gold royalties,
gas royalties, troubled twitches of artists,
poets, buskers? Once, Elijah came across

from the Big Smoke, and climbed into the tree house —
now gone, felled by a storm; but then, when
the small house was proud in the fork of the tree,

he lay on his side and counted days and nights,
waiting for someone to come up from the house
to serve him, eventually rising to find them.


Dream Canto 5: Torch Bearing

I am out and about in a clear but dark night,
torch in hand, shining into the tree-tops;
beam weak enough not to alarm

roosting birds too much — I am seeking
out the epistemological ambiguity of owls
and tawny frogmouths, as if différance

were my own words fragmented as flashes
and twinges of branches, leaves, claws, feathers.
The locale shudders with interruption,

and something moves rapidly below
through the dry grass as I look up.
In the early morning, small birds

will wind up like ratchets and unfurl,
and the staggering sense of indecision
will finish night movements just begun.


Canto of Ghosts

Ghosts fuck with my head
like clichés; I can no longer
bear the fog though it’s so thick

in the morning that drought
is plagiarism, text dropped
in without its torments of content.

Fog is salubrious irony, a dampened
field of static like the dreams semi-
forming before I sleep — I am increasingly

tired to counteract years of unsleeping;
I see words entirely printed,
and if I type fast enough

I get them down, then they feed
from red text to green to blue,
I see them drip down

when I close my eyes; in the bush,
so narrow, patchy, all is borrowed.
I saw a thylacine a few years back

and spoke out but no one listened.
Astonishing, like these ghosts
that fuck with my head,

upsetting lineation and speech,
everybody writing about the nightbirds
kept in the belfry, never

going to church though feeling odd
when we pass it by. Thinking too hard
on being struck by lightning

makes one curl, like the lemon tree
which for years has remained
the same height with yellow leaves

gradually disappearing, never fruiting;
or the sky-hole outside my window
being grown-over by lucerne leaves,

the black sheep gone — they would have
eaten the lucerne tree to a stalk and the hole
would still resonate, like a protest

against complaints that it’s heating up
or the three-million-dollar
locust eradication spray program;

another dead breath over
the land’s corpse; it’s so basic
it loses rhythm, loses tactility

and pleasure to utter — I’m simply
unworthy of paradise and don’t
want to go there, and it’s never been

here so that won’t work as apologia;
the ghosts prattle on, getting in shape:
when it goes they go, heavy-lidded,

bent double like poetic naturalists
capturing vigour and warning
in equal measure; that’s no criticism

but a kind of despair, like hollow-point
bullets or 1080 poison to clean
things up: true, the soul does

spill from the hands, clasped to keep
its amorphous seepage in check:
plurals and collective nouns

countervailing prime ministers,
presidents, chancellors, intelligence
people… security guards,

lumps of phosphate fertiliser
held like plates welded to the skull,
champion parents, champion

golfers, owners of John Deere tractors
pinned down by fog, blaming
the ghost-warped and thirsty

and doubters of workplace
agreements: never weighed down by ghosts,
never compelled to sanction

what they lose when my head fills
with their ghosts, my hands can’t lift
from the weight of being clenched.