Another Poem for the Slaughtered Trees on Toodyay Road (just south of Toodyay town)

Seeing an Excavator Tooth-extractor Push Over an Old-growth Wandoo

            On the Road to Perth Just South of Toodyay

Subset of incantatory praise of CAT planet-wrecking machinery —

the 50-ton excavator with range of buckets — shears groomers

grabs skeletons mud rock batter teeth — that will debranch and tear

a trunk will twist to push and rip out the old-growth wandoo

before your eyes as workaday as time sheets. Watch the headstrong

tree pushed over to tilt at planners’ windmills tumbling into gully

and reach for your mouth your maw always that bloody dental

analogy tedious as jawing and mouthing on and on so phobic and gory.

Excavator tracks knuckle by knuckle scallop by scallop levered

forward chain of command steel confrontation with tree flesh

resilience till give — root and nerve sans anaesthetic bare to the gaze

of sadists or maybe just the blithely indifferent. Cruel and clear sap bloody.

Subset of incantatory and cruel as therapy designed to get you back

to work that damages, keep you dulled to pulling and pushing,

tearing teeth from the jawing and mouthing the wordy planet —

induce an illiteracy of presence, an exclamation of pain without

vocabulary. After all, who can speak with a numbed lip anyway?

This CAT-induced literacy of being the excavator that pulls and pushes

as well as digs, this deployment of rough surgical equipment, this grooming

of planet to run roughshod and unmake syntax to realign sense.

Where is this room for finding in a subset of incantatory praise?

Surely there’s room to find a way in and back out via the gap

made by the CAT 50-ton excavator’s work ethic, its showing

the way to what will be — bloody mouth empty of tree-teeth; smiley-faced?

            John Kinsella