<< Issue 33
John Kinsella
Shy Sun Orchid Fourier Transform Paraphs
Climb out of the grasses
on fool’s gold gradient
to pastel a plume of demi–
lit sun; an act of imagism
vs. realism, a vacillating
uptake of attractions.
Stunner to my insect-human eyes,
implanted when I was
a child; missed by pathology,
screen-tests for creativity.
Staring so long to catch flowers
opening, grass scintillate
reminder of perceptual
intensity; insect-human eyes.
Nothing left growing
when extracted in future tense,
sap risen to last flower’s
apex of repetition; mimicry
of a prototype
claiming posterity.
How syncopated the conversations,
shared space of growth and fertilising.
Between seasons when silence;
temporal map of pollen fractals.
Flourishing bacilli or building
blocks of ensuing epochs –
all those precise, predictive
almanacs: the floral linguistics.
We imagine the flourishes
charting a spectrum,
indulging in saturation.
At which point they dazzled.
Singularly. As plethora.
Flaming with rumour
even after the infrared ID,
after flowers shuttered with night.
I was there for the long haul,
attracted and committed.
Too long in a sun
I sought the cool
of gradient as seasons
switched about – reassurance
of fool’s gold, cold sweat
but high UV. Orange worldviews.
Declining but rising to red,
secondary as hue in a centring of palmistry.
What else could I do
but believe? Rhetorically.
John Kinsella’s recent books of poetry include Insomnia (Picador, 2019/Norton, 2020), Brimstone: a book of villanelles (Arc, 2020) and Aftering Delmore Schwartz’s A Season in Hell [Rimbaud] Translation (Equipage, 2021). Recent critical titles include Beyond Ambiguity: tracing literary sites of activism (Manchester University Press, 2021) and Legibility: an anti-fascist poetics (Palgrave, 2022).