Thursday, March 31, 2016

After Storm Katie: a poem


  for Tracy, after twenty years of Cambridge


Getting out. Good for physical and mental health.
And the coal tit ratcheting up so local and yet we know
that refrain from Swabia. Shouldn’t be surprised by this.
Humans validate their omnivorous desire for presence
in the global and the local, the near and far. Polyamorous 

for place. So I am walking the route as if it’s my route 
mapped onto my psyche — out towards Madingley. But 
the gigantic West Cambridge University Estate is becoming
and Seven Pillars arch over the incomplete buildings:
seven yellow cranes facing away from south-westerlies
dying off with sunset. The entire south has been ‘battered’

into a weird submissiveness, and semantics and intonation
and subtext and double-meanings ramp up the translation.
The ground is being trained, the domestic brutalised by
the forces of God which have bizarrely become our forces.
We control the weather by inverted default. We are pantheistic

and pandemic and universal. All at once. I think this, marvelling
the Seven Pillars have stayed upright, their long arms reaching
towards tomorrow’s sunrise as the planet skews a little more,
and those concrete counterweights heavy as security. Into the sun,
then buffering it through the back of my head, the roads hiss
as all come out to play and unbroken daffodils look to their roots.


  John Kinsella




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