Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Mowing
It’s a rev thing this ingenu
contemplates as his bum vibrates
and ball-sack shakes, whipping
his sperm to a cream or frenzy,
or wiping out the last ones—
those missed by the herbicides
he dumps on the firebreaks.
It’s hard to revel in winter greenery
chopped to an herby piquancy,
to feel a renewal come out of the red dirt
you know it disguises; strap-on, ride-on flirt,
he skirts fruit trees bare as the nudity
that takes him to the refrigerator
when the rest of the house sleeps,
his curvaceous paddocks close and smooth,
velvet on a flawed skin rising up
to meet him with every thrust.
John Kinsella’s new book of stories, Pantheism, is forthcoming in Australia in late 2020; his new book of poetry, Insomnia, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton next year also. His critical book Polysituatedness was published by Manchester University Press in 2016. His Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley was published in 2010 by Liverpool University Press. He is a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and professor of literature and environment at Curtin University, Western Australia. (updated 9/2019)
Kinsella’s Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems was reviewed in AGNI Online by Eric McHenry