Local Crops, Tübingen
I was worried about the local crops
in the way I have been worried about crops
since I was a child riding the tractor
on the farm, since I searched for answers
in grain silos, since I worked 'on the wheat bins',
and since I disc-ploughed the stolen
ground for wheat and oat seeding.
This worry was part of processing
contradictions between eating and being de trop.
I was worried about the local crops
because of the long hot dry weather —
the young corn withering, beans pods under-
sized, and oats wilting. Then storms
brought vigour at last moments, and storms
corkscrewed into sections to make empty patterns,
and storms unleashed further contradictions.
Back At College After 2.5 Years Away, I am ‘Studied’ by the Grey Heron Standing in the Same Place in the Same Way
I am testing the boundaries of history
and have observed that it’s much less
about humans than is presumed.
Each sampling of animals as animals,
of poems ‘about’ animals, exposes
an over emphasis on humans. It’s not
a matter of those old deceptions — pathetic
fallacy and anthropomorphism
(animals wish for some equality!) —
but the case itself: everything serving
a human interest. There are no
poems written by animals available
to me, though I try to keep my senses
open. The grey heron standing
in the same place and in the same way
2.5 years on from where I last saw it
might be either playing a game
or enacting the deeply familiar
or both — one eye searching beyond
reflections and lily pads. Read:
average life span is ‘5 years in the wild’
and up to’ 23 years has been recorded’.
They have been collated. Cohabitating
with humans. Tolerating humans.
Appalled by mimicry in sculptures and text,
or expecting me to appear just as was when I left,
to compare anatomies in the same manner,
against the same topography, 2.5 years further
on in a history it has paralleled
or intersected or denies.
Apollo (Metamorphosis)
I don’t expect
to find the leaves
of a plant
with your name
formed
by the veins.
No god will
have gifted
you the future
as a flower
when flowers
are losing
their footholds.
And you didn’t
inhabit metaphor
when you were
living, so
why now?
You expected
your body
to be able to do
what it had always
been able to do,
and when
it couldn’t,
there was no
flourishing
under new
conditions.
The internal
combustion engine
you knew
inside out
in all its iterations;
the fuel stations
you managed;
the machines
you kept
on the road.
All of it has to change,
and the gap between
now and then
is not open
for a new species
of plant
to take hold.
As ‘mechanical’
vies with ‘botanical’
the names
of those lost
blur
in the veins.
John Kinsella is a poet, novelist, critic, essayist and editor. He is a Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.