Canto of the Borders (being a fragment of Canto 33)
- Canto of the Borders (being a fragment of Canto 33)
Deus, venerunt gentes, or, alternatively,we wander your borders, three of us: me,Tim, and Tracy. Katherine is at school.
No rain, no tractors. Cars feather distanceand Tracy goes where she's never been before,though familiar with the survey.
The smog we've carried back in our lungsweighs heavily, contra wheatlands' virginityis imposed by the driest beginning to winter
in memory. Record-breaking is a cliché.Modicum, et non videbitis me;et iterum and modicum, et vos videbitis me
are set against each other as paradoxesof paddock corners, or modes of traversal:the bare firebreaks, patches of caltrop,
climbing of fences, lichen strongholds,wasp nests, galls, termite encrustation,Jackie Winter pinpointing acacia-jumps,
seven holes in compressed weed-tailings,rodent imperialism, stretches where foxesand cats have padded in frost-dust,
flowering gums and flooded gumschaotically large, dishevelled citieswith massive populations, almost
self-sustaining, to share as sharedbehind the walls of a distant, city convent—native riverbush in a wealthy suburb, [End Page 92]
developers' power held back by church power,as through the turn contemplation and rigmaroleand denial and heavy cloth and wattle birds
and New Holland Honeyeaters cataclysmic,amok amid banksia flowers subdividing day:two days, two nights, cells where rest is selfish.
The familiar gravel driveway is where we've seensnakes cross regularly through summer; approachingat right angles in winter there's no sign left,
sun cold-welding rocks they broke out of,liquid to the gaze of the mesospheric eaglescome down from the highest tree
at the peak of the mountain: here,in turning round we are elevated. Inthe dead grass we count scalds
left by stars: constellations transposed—fire where there's little fuel; and soclockwise we close out residency,
our child born of copulation and prayer:both constant, endless narrations, in darkand light and extremes of temperature. Sphinx
is a magnesium flash unlike the one eruptingfrom the parrot bush, but connected by telling,by sight. Tracy's obsession: the loss
of speech, coins tossed in darkness as onewho's there and doesn't speak himself,drinks the air, adds coins to the equation.
She travels far for Anne Garréta,doppelganger of the genderless whore,or liturgist of: . . . la voix de Tiff en un éclair
de magnesium avait vrillé dans moncerveau, which Tracy translates as:"Tiff's voice in a magnesium flash [End Page 93]
had pierced my mind" or "Tiff'svoice had bored into my brainin a magnesium flash."
Leaving, we recall what we've seen,spoken of, collected in notebooksand photos. There'll be little harvesting
this year. They'll lament the lackof killing, dying, and drying-off.All will be scarcer. [End Page 94]
John Kinsella is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University and a Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He was Professor of English at Kenyon College, Ohio from 2001-2005. His new book, Purgatorio: Up Close and Paradiso: Rupture, will be published by W. W. Norton in 2008.
