John Kinsella

Dormant are pinnacles and streams of the mountains, Chasms and bluffs and crawlers fed by the dark earth; Dormant are wild animals and that tribe of bees And monsters out of the sea’s dark syntax; Dormant are clans of birds with wings that envelop.

Why “raspberry jam tree?” Acacia acuminata. Mungart. The guilt of cut wood? Its smell, its bloody show? And that colorist’s jam envy, the lust for ropes of raspberry. Fence-posts sturdy and hardy and doused in creosote: to stand alone in Termitesville. The sweetness turns rust. And burnt offerings unless dried right through — say for a year on the pile. Hot as hell to fire. Nothing comes cost-free, we hear — those layers of its dozen years a demonstration in history as accumulation. Collective survey of occupation: the real corps de ballet, the shrubby scenery, bulldozed on roadsides. Ring a Ring o’ Roses. All those brandings. Emblem of our town that would miss no more than our rates. “High turnover” region. Think raspberry jam on white damper, think coals of fires. The meager shade for sheep and cattle and the denial of “unproductive” animals. Nuisances. Saw deep into rough bark, showered in pollen. Unholy fires at the end of winter; and all that premonition, all those seeds with snow in their bellies, snow that can’t fall from this faraway sky. So overwhelmingly familiar to me. No Old Country raspberry homesickness. Just an inkling of anthocyanin pigments. Why “raspberry jam tree?” Acacia acuminata. Mungart.

Lichen glows in the moonlight so fierce only cloud blocking the moon brings relief. Then passed by, recharged it leaps up off rocks and suffocates—there is no route through rocks without having to confront its beseeching—it lights the way, not the moon, and outdoes epithets like phosphorescent, fluorescent, or florescent: it smirks and smiles and lifts the corner of its lips in hideous or blissful collusion, and birds pipe an eternal dawn, never knowing when to sleep or wake. They might be tricked into thinking their time’s up, in the spectrum of lichen, its extra-gravital persuasion, its crackling movement remembered as still, indifferent, barely living under the sun, or on a dark night; climbing up you’d escape, but like all great molecular weights it leaves traces you carry with you into the realms of comfort and faith.

You’ve got to understand that sighting the pair of eagles over the block, right over our house, not more than twenty feet above the roof, so massive their wings pull at the corrugated tin sheeting even with gentlest tilt, counteracts bitterness against all the damage I see and hear around me on an exclusively crisp blue morning, when clarity is pain and even one small missing wattle tree, entirely vanquished since I was last here at home—I still find this hard to say—is agony; a region is not a pinpoint and a different compass works in my head, having magnetics for all directions and all pointing to one spot I know and observe as closely as possible; and even one small vanished or vanquished wattle tree is agony close to death for me, where I find it hard to breathe to feed myself to get past the loss; but the pair of eagles still appearing and keeping their sharp and scrupulous eyes honed, overrides this ordeal, though I wish their victims life too and their damage is traumatic as anything else; that’s as much sense or nonsense as I can make in such blue light.

They’d been warned on every farm that playing in the silos would lead to death. You sink in wheat. Slowly. And the more you struggle the worse it gets. ‘You’ll see a rat sail past your face, nimble on its turf, and then you’ll disappear.’ In there, hard work has no reward. So it became a kind of test to see how far they could sink without needing a rope to help them out. But in the midst of play rituals miss a beat—like both leaping in to resolve an argument as to who’d go first and forgetting to attach the rope. Up to the waist and afraid to move. That even a call for help would see the wheat trickle down. The painful consolidation of time. The grains in the hourglass grotesquely swollen. And that acrid chemical smell of treated wheat coaxing them into a near-dead sleep.

The Angry God of  This World & His Throne in Purgatory Fog day, give us the sun. But the particulate hangover from Stuttgart’s bad days obscures. The weather of modernity. The lady’s tattooed musculature is what comes of getting too close to the angry father. Decode. He’d been left behind. We get on well now. Punk diadem, scales unjust, iced and fired, messianic Virgil and the golden aspiration for one wandering around in diaphanous red, the zoo escapees looking on hungrily but nervously. And a little bit curious. Even at the height of Coondle heat when I rose before dawn to catch the sun’s origins I realized I was looking into the core of purgatory. The house would stretch and crack with heat but then, as the sun played its games with the horizon, the curve of the hill, the house was at its coolest and retracted so a glass pane shattered into the corridor. The conspiracy of good and bad. Who is to choose? I don’t mind the walk, negotiating rough ground, but when jerks are taking potshots at you, it makes it impossible. I don’t use a GPS. A bit of bush knowledge, a lot of common sense. But this is Tübingen and we’re nearing our time: the songbird insurgence and weather vanes and swans, the bare branches and killed trees, the welcome and hatred of refugees, questions of which fruit will ripen or mature or fall or offer seed when its time comes. I study Hölderlin manuscripts with a friend and we will rewrite “Half of Life” upside down. The inversions of travel and temporariness and permanence. Tracy speaks to me from across the old town. It hasn’t rained today but the Ammer River is still swift outside this window. Classic. Stock epithet burnout. Behind the glissade of faces the goings home. Vengeance lurks therein. Such beautiful youth. Floating on Friday night promise. This brutal God watching on. In store. Adorning places of worship. I apologize for the distractions. Wondering while I write.

It didn’t happen in that order— the endless growl of what will turn out to be miniature quad and trail bikes, carried along the top of the valley and rumbling its contents: small kids with helmets weighing more than their heads, ragged on by parents with crossed arms and ambition in their eyes: round and round the drone of fun. A country pursuit. Tracy tells me a professor of economics at a local city university while praising capitalism says he will only listen to opposition if it comes from one who eats only lentils, has given up cars and eschews imported brands of foodstuffs. Lentils? Contradictions aside, I’ll take him on, though it might be hard to hear me speak above the junior quad-bike circus performing along the hills. But hark, I’ll tell you something unusually usual: at dusk wandering the block with Katherine we came across shreds of chemical-pink balloon with plastic string attached to its tied-off umbilical cord, clearly an escapee from a party, the child—her name decorating the balloon with three crosses for kisses— in tears, chasing it up into the sky, watching it drift over the hills, her letter to the world a single word and her mark made over. Katherine asks if I recall the balloons her class back in England released with school name and address and how one floated all the way over the Channel and on to Belgium where another child picked up the shreds and deciphered the message and wrote back; weather balloons, “hopes and ambitions” as Delmore says, but without doubt or skepticism, in full expectation they will land somewhere far away and bring joy to the finder. I throw the shred of balloon away, fearing an animal crossing the block in the dark, night-eyed and keenly sampling the ground and the air with its snout, will reread or misread the code of chemical pinkness, and like some Red Riding Hood in reverse, choke on the gift of chance.