On Helen Frankenthaler’s On the Cusp (1985) and the White-faced Heron, Circa… by John Kinsella

After the fires south of here but everywhere for life 

left in the zone, a hundred-and-forty-five millimetres 

of rain fell in about sixty hours and did the impossible — flooded

the side of the hill. Everywhere standing water 

as an end to ‘summer’, a red letter day a banner day

that couldn’t realise as green rises early to entangle

with heat that would singe its enthusiasm. In this, 

flooded gullies and brooks, a river of transmuting colours,

and those pools on the paddocks as if floodplain

could be forgotten in the erasing of artefacts, tracks.

How far from the sketch is the saturation of ‘autumn’,

how far is the tragedy or travesty, how far is Hamlet

in someone’s book case or portfolio? I did see a handsaw

that will be the handsaw, the flash of face the bird

among sheep. And as always we search for the hawk

despite its disruption, and as always we think renewable

when the forest is upturned for rare earths. I look brazen

from above even when suppressed sweating to ground  — charred

line no aspect of mine to gather, roll out, collate, and say less

than enough as expectation of a suitable light at the perpendicular.

John Kinsella’s most recent volumes of poetry include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems 1980-2015 (Picador, 2016) and Insomnia (WW Norton, 2020).  His new memoir is Displaced: a rural life (Transit Lounge, 2020). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Emeritus Professor at Curtin University.