Published 25 March 202231 May 2022 · Poetry / Friday Features / Friday Poetry Poetry | Rezoning John Kinsella ‘Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin’ —Apollinaire False praise lights up the launch site, O delivery vehicle. The delivery zone is empty but investors have no crisis of relevance and couldn’t care less — deliveries are taking place elsewhere and will continue until the cows come home — there’s metal-dust on the water vats, the hand-sanitiser dispenser is exhausted or ignored. Rezoning the bushland for places of worship where bushland is a place of worship is a key to whose paradox? You don’t need the dark web to purchase a skeleton key as they’re available via adverts beneath online television guides: in plain sight. The phone tower has blended with landscape — tallest tree on top of the hill admired or ignored by those travelling in hertz rental waves. Satellites are the Roc image of cascading truths, but where is the passion of a God’s eye view, the shepherds mulesing the sheep — traumatised bleats and a virtual life, well, elsewhere. Remember, those anti-pastorals published in Cuba brought on a conversation of tangents. Working the genealogy into a frenzy, feeling the sun probe the factor seventy, repairing fences to work as two-way mirrors, locating the cloud within the cloud to counteract the forecast — psalms of endgame splashed about as memory. Or turning away from visible streets, you might think to find solace in a box of discarded records only to find they are littered with discs from skinhead neo-Nazis bands, causing a rupture in the lucky dip of materialism, the aesthetics of fatalism. And so, the geranium flowering affects people passing in so many different ways, their political affiliations and anxieties finding less correlation in facial expressions, the touchscreen correspondences. Each eulogy of mass-communication lauds its own modes of travelling. Easily said by someone so glib, you might say? The red flowering gum is over the line, the other side, and yet we see and smell its influence — I travel nowhere now after travelling as if it were a right, which is not the same. A fantail flew in front of the car and I braked suddenly, in time, a wagtail did the same a few kilometres later and I missed that as well. Such is the irony of travel and heavy industry, but that was locally, which we might say is not the same. How many points on the globe accrued in moment and result? I am just saying. Or you are just asking. What is the point of coming inside if you don’t salute the pollen, the loose leaves, swirling of sand, the carapace of a dead beetle curling. Testing of sewerage shows up fragments of virus. Strong indicators. And wide-usage of methamphetamines. And so much else? Rivals for dominance of space exploration occupy the same space as rivals for dominance of space. Music selected for voyages. They wish to refill the Hadron emptiness. Exhausted by a future, they are rezoning the spiritual in more ways than one — plethoras. Some have contracts to offer as proof. Others have tenders to show they believe in absolute self-belief. The dying can’t breathe. Who am I with my alternative up-bringing? Who am I with my murky personal history? Who am I to shade in the blanks in a colour- by-numbers that reveals a hawk that isn’t a hawk? City streets traversed to know a city for all its change as we lapse, starving on replays. You could update via ‘streetview’, but phantom memories seem not to counter a short-circuit. Empirically smart buildings glint, gorging themselves into those Pyrrhic sunsets, wasted dawns. The cutting of the sun’s throat is a threat made by weapons-researchers beyond closed doors of their ‘personal lives’. As if secretive activities can be separated from behaviour of, say, in the home. This is entangled with patriotism, isn’t it? Being so different from watching a sparrowhawk to learn more about its ways of processing errors, taking a non-lethal interest in its fluctuations. The movie star can join the party of double- standards, and millions of sceptics and believers will watch collaterally. I’ve heard peacocks calling to close out a day, perching high in pepper trees, retracting their displays to fit — I never saw eyes I saw punctuation marks. And as for the lyre-bird, it mimics a different side of the continent and sounds off the spectrum of colours here — warning and comfort, distraction and assurance. A lyre and a bird are at risk from foxes at risk from shooters. Ah, disbeliever saying prayers methodically. Discount the biography, accolades, self-permissions, promises of deliverance, a place in the aftermath. The monastery fantasy of devotion is a safe house of isolation? Casting stones at light-collecting surfaces, or comfortable in the choices you are able to make? Who will scribe the ruins of investment? Who will mimeograph when spare parts fail? Who will illustrate the cold(ness) clichés of space making the keepers so hot under their collars? Who will scry the contradictions for their own silences? Who will sign the documents of renunciation? Who will give up what they have extracted no matter how much they damn that extraction? Aren’t these issues of writing? Of the shaping or malformation of script? Aren’t these turnings of notation? How to write ‘without prejudice’, without weighting the tones? Atonal pitchforks descaling the walls of centralised power. We hope to accumulate our loves and gather love safely? Remember the unimpressive view on the busier side of a hill, heading down to the stunning but oil-polluted bay. Remember the chromatics of migrant birds affording your(self) the luxury of seeing where they left and where they’ve arrived, doing so much more work than you. Cells. How many can we lose to the phrase? Rural land zoning as malleable as extraction — animal husbandry, ‘forestry’ and ‘natural resource management’. Notice the drills reaching deep under the paddocks: zoning will cope with greenwash that will gush out like power from lithium batteries. We document from remnant vegetation: eye to the knothole, galah watching on from the loveheart-shaped opening to its annual nesting hollow, knowing ‘temporary’ is a mining company’s demi-secret password. Knowing ‘diversity’ is a definition of a workforce, a demographical lexicon without breadth for exchange, for challenges to its authority. Who is in this travelogue? What is noted in decorative acts, the collecting and collating across hemispheres? Farewells conditional on leisuretime. The culturally unfamiliar adorning new pages of self-affirmation, shared visionless, hackers with bells on polarised, or senses dulled. Overland’s Friday Features project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. John Kinsella John Kinsella’s new work includes the story collection Pushing Back (Transit Lounge, 2021), Saussure's Kaleidoscope Graphology Drawing-Poems (Five Islands Press/Apothecary Archive, 2021) and The Ascension of Sheep: Collected Poems Volume 1 (UWAP, 2022). More by John Kinsella › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. 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