Pick up language as it pronounces
to make speech signs someone
might connect with, even as recoil.
Just how it comes, modulated,
to speak as desperate to be under-
stood not conscious of proprietary
acts of propriety of whose mouth
formed what in the exclamation
of raid or the demi-hush of swan
over lake, the crake, the barking
fox the dingo call, the moon crackling
along the spine of red dunes.
This fenceline, barbed cackle
emitted against the enclosure,
the polypropylene tent of mouthing.
You can’t have complete origins
of the world as crow wet with surprise
rain come where arteries had been
opened to fill pluperfect, they had,
the beak snapped shut is registered
as owned as ‘snack, crackle, pop’,
a garnering & outpouring.
John Kinsella
Illustration Nick Victor