Two Poems

WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 13 photos : tracy ryan Two Poems by John Kinsella Gatekeepers Arriving home in the pitch dark before the Milky Way floods the moonless night with pinpoint accuracy, we find a pair of roos either side of the crossover, lit-up in the headlights, coy eye-to-eye, turning slightly away to protect their retinas, allowing maculas to take in the writing of car, bluemetal, gravel, fence, blue-black grass. I step out to open the gate and they move off either side, equidistant, balanced in the shadows, peripheral to the operation of opening. I return to Tracy and Tim and we talk it over, then drive on through, sentinels neither allowing or denying, but switching the side-on glance to full intake, absorption of our light and its risks, the consequences of grazing where people have so long been away, where new rules will come into play, but they’ll be let go about their business and we will too. From Barley Lake Concertinaing hairpins and striated red rock, precarious as bogs that look set to profile permanence but will slide away without notice. Cutaway face where bog-cotton wires hope to openness, looking out across Barley Lake, as deep as we can imagine, trapped in the prospect. From Mount Crossterry I can look ahead to getting back to Rosewood Cottage and hearing Niall has only days to live. Plotting our book on Moondyne Joe, Niall and I sat among the books at Jam Tree Gully and discussed the directions we might take. No static history, no imprisonment in fact of hearsay. I’d like to tell him now that I saw Moondyne up at Barley Lake, hiding out in clefts, plotting his next move. A West Australian on the run in Ireland. But that would be too much the truth, and truth distorts over distance. Instead, I will tell him in my head that I watched a jackdaw eyeing the lake and tough, raddled sheep belonging to no farmer, roaming free, discussing ideas. John Kinsella’s most recent volumes of poetry are Jam Tree Gully (2012), which won the Australian Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, and the just-released Sack (2014). He is Professor of Sustainability and Literature at Curtin University, a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. above A glimpse of Barley Lake, situated just west of Glengarriff in southern Ireland. poetry

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