- Free Article: No
- Contents Category: Poem
- Review Article: Yes
- Article Title: Lyrical Unification in Gambier
- Online Only: No
- Custom Highlight Text:
‘Lyrical Unification in Gambier’ a poem by John Kinsella
(i)
What remains barely the weather report: sentencing labours of history
against all beginnings, the maples
leafless, the houses barely porous.
(ii)
I ride roads I am not familiar with,
a figure of speech, chrome strips
between windows. To the south,
burial mounds. Resolution
deep and simpatico. Northwards:
the lake effect, the snow plough.
(iii)
Deer go down to bow and gun,
roadkill is a ‘cull’: beauty
in the eye of rhetoric
keeps the engine
ticking over.
(iv)
Cornstalks like rotted Ceres’
thin black teeth. To end with this.
A season of political arrangements,
remnant snow quarried
like that pitiless ocean.
(v)
The driver must resist
all beauty, the smell
of an unfamiliar passenger.
A door rattles, the car
is almost new.
It is shut properly. Speed limit.
Farm machinery. A (solitary)
white field enclosed
by thawed pages.
(vi)
Maples, oak ... all kinds.
A tornado ripped through here
three months ago and didn’t
touch the houses either side.
Birds warble in the engine
cavity. A cord of wood
stretches out below
the kitchen window.
He says we listen
differently.
