Gestalt 1 by John Kinsella

Compensating for the yaw of thyroxine
I staged crossovers between Monet’s 

Water Lilies. What comes back to me
are epithets and rooms flowing into rooms; 

there’s a prism and tuning fork at 256 hertz,
a crater in which the violent defend their actions. 

Mapping a circuit board, geography suits
the irregular as well: echoes/water table. 

I started building an alternative
pattern but declined into substitution. 

I learn across refrains and coalesce
as ancestors’ half-told tales. Sweep the gated 

skeleton and follow through. Induce resistance;
transform, gyrate and measure capacitance. 

To serve a less regular function, underpin
a range of gambits, shadow the nacre of spirits. 

What I see in my non-sleep zombie state.
Arranged as ‘night’. A flock’s refraction. 

I am giving up on binary and I sweat away
my past. Volatile oils of eucalypt leaves. 

Why adjust red eye or ablate the coronas
of aerial phenomena? Hear 430 terahertz, 

then all frequencies and colours of flight.
Stasis — describing holes in the calendar; 

stasis — noting the shifts but not being
able to do anything about them. Moths. 

John Kinsella is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction and criticism. A recent book of poetry is Metaphysics (MadHat, 2023) with a new selected poems forthcoming from WW Norton, and a new collection of poems from Turtle Point Press early 2025.

4 December 2023