<< Issue 33
John Kinsella
The Surrounding Phenomena of Resighting ‘Eclipse Island’
(i)
Eclipse tunes ocean
to rush continent
unsparing steel-
sculpture bluster;
seal ancestors
know the trauma
dividended by city
and port, oil in lamps
to write treatises
and scripts.
(ii)
Antarctic-whirled sea
complots with wind to say
hard-headed, to say
fish skeletons, to say
glare-clouded quotes
a pressure issue of warning
flash which says days
are works and a sailor
imposes theogony where
songs of walk swim fly
were established when
now was shifting into place.
(iii)
The edgy cameras are claws
over ‘gap’ the engineered sublimity
to dare promotional quips,
but series as building projects
where the budget is blown
high rise vertical lacky band
da Vinci rotor, military echo
of drone filming drone
filing each glyph of visit
and/or those lost in contemplation
and trigger warning signs
of despair as small land-birds
buffer all that impact
and fall imposed by plans
and by-laws and investments
that shake vertebrae of peninsula —
cogs, teeth, notches, indents
in the mechanism of drift.
(iv)
Doubts sweep faces
as Eclipse Island retunes
to compensate as much as it can
for searches and microcosms
of plastics of rewriting
that breakdown as instructions
and glow sticks. Drones drift
out to sea for all the screen
presence their operators
insist on, salt altered
roots as trunks of prostrate
coastal scrub, veins and arteries
neither warm nor cold blooded.
(v)
Together it offsets
but clarity isn’t recall
though told to all
befits organism sea
swell shell,
crash and withdrawal.
Social skills and crossing
on rough waxing waters
whose illustrations
are as rich as monochrome,
retrieved blue and greens,
hull paint a threat
to barnacles. Careen
each story in rock.
(vi)
Had planned reply
but decades collapsed.
Last thoughts, loving
the effects of heights,
medium of thick water
against stone
never as hard
as the claims.
But the lines are unbreakable
as coast binds coast,
island calls on mainland
to let go, to redress.
(vii)
What I lost sight of: the eclipse
which I backtrack to release
the mental shadow, to listen
for its true name, for the layered
science of why rock floats
and yet stays fixed, makes
its own astrology.
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).