John Kinsella

is drying-off so its many leaves rustle a different colour

I am conscious of its former shape and its withered reshaping

while comparing a prior green-leaf-vigour with a new beige colour

It disturbs as I pass with more life after its loss of transmitting-sap,

the many components taken as a whole with variegations in colour

As deep undersea pressure will reshape a hollow into a solid,

or the chambers of a shell flatten to nacre or absence of light: sans colour

Following systems and motifs or erosion as our systems place pressure

on gradations and ignore the biodegradables, as a branch falls across colour

what’s happened — it duplicates, and we see it this time

Sacred kingfisher perches on the verandah rail, tracking insects

which double-image against glass and it strikes its rival, its own time

From inside the half-light of house we are part of the reflection

but, standing back, not part of a transparency, slightly out of its time

Its time. Subject object, insect. But kingfisher detects us just before

being swooped by a jiddy jiddy, turning to face origins, beak agape

Subject-object, angles of flight. Insects high-lit against polarised glass

now transparent with shifted perspective, and other birds doubled in time:

rufous whistler’s warning call, yellow-rumped thornbills hopping

sudden over low scaffolds of dry grass; morning of insects and kingfisher time.

as adeptly as astronomers — we lacunae of the ephemerides

Neither ascending nor declining, we nonetheless

gravitate in attraction because we rely on more than ephemera

I am shaky either side of the earth, but I adore it,

and centring the sun I reach collinear to find more than ephemera

The peaks and troughs of our decades together — barely ‘great masses’

to make passionate an L4 or L5 on that vertex, well beyond ephemera

And as my journals are pictures and observations of natural phenomena,

opinion is celestial mechanics, and verse charts beyond the ephemeris