Poem

Pastiche Eclogue with Randolph Stow’s ‘Ishmael’

by John Kinsella •

August 2021, no. 434

Poem

Pastiche Eclogue with Randolph Stow’s ‘Ishmael’

by John Kinsella •

August 2021, no. 434

When Ishmael escaped from the closed Bible
on the dresser with family names that were

only tangentially yours, you looked to the emergency
site for inclemency and found fire was rapidly

approaching via dire easterlies that actually start from the south
and over the stretch of time just inside a zone sharply

bend west to gather inner heat, saying, I love as much
as your weight of extracted moisture, the soupçons

of winnowings, the haunted maps you foist
on the chart table, showing demarcations and claims,

these accumulations of original sin, these town halls,
these favoured venues for worship, that unholy

rearrangement of desert and salt lakes into surveys
and peggings, into trenches and bores – the resources

of ground-penetrating radar and satellite clusters, the red
blooms waxen and outside the martial governance,

the big-wheeled machinery, the conveyor belts,
a taste of Antarctic melt this far into the ‘permissions’,

into the tapers that set light to your fury, your love
a gesture of protest in floodlit country ignoring you.

John Kinsella

John Kinsella is the author of over forty books. His most recent publications include the novel Lucida Intervalla (UWA Publishing 2018), Open Door (UWA Publishing, 2018); On the Outskirts (UQP, 2017), and Drowning in Wheat: Selected poems (Picador, 2016). His poetry collections have won a variety of awards, including the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry and the Christopher Brennan Award for Poetry. His volumes of stories include In the Shade of the Shady Tree (Ohio University Press, 2012), Crow’s Breath (Transit Lounge, 2015), and Old Growth (Transit Lounge, 2017). His volumes of criticism include Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, 2017). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University. With Tracy Ryan he is the co-editor of The Fremantle Press Anthology of The Western Australian Poetry (2017). He lives with his family in the Western Australian wheatbelt.