Ern Malley Jr. : Mercurial, Mirabell… Anopheles: Culture-shift

By | 26 November 2005

YOU CANNOT
CANNOT BE
BE SERIOUS, I called
to Anopheles, courtside at Burswood,
you cannot be serious in leaving me
discordant as gene-sheers,
idle at dark tables;
I bespoke a cenotaph,
I digested cultures
with scroll and hoof,
aloof the single photon,
chamber-pot in the settler house
cracked like Chernobyl
or Three Mile Island, ALAS,
I am deserted, I vote
wren to car, car to caravan,
driven by my loaded twankydillo,
not much change and not much light,
not much myth of instigation
or invented faithfulness…
I have found a home on the perimeters
of Lucas Heights: a medicine ball
scrotum blossoming, a stringing
up of hotness and mosquitoes,
incendiary in the dry reductions
of Culture as Exhibit… Town Council's
forsaken hope, described as thus,
Anopheles… your gusset-work,
your floor of Heav'n commissioned
as ark on redolent patines ?? steamy room plush,
an eloquent twister strip..
OH NAUGHTY NATURE ?´s teat-grip,
positron emission best kept
tomography, perambulating
hand of nomad's glans,
in-exactitude of longing wraiths,
loin cloths, and rent-a-cops.

Ern is of the park, and occasionally further afield. He channels, divines, and is pretty much an open book. He is losing his ambitions.

 


This entry was posted in 24: CHILDREN OF MALLEY and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.
John Kinsella's most recent works include the poetry volumes Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador, 2016) and Open Door (UWAP, 2018), the story collections Crow’s Breath (Transit Lounge 2015) and Old Growth (Transit Lounge, 2017), and the critical volume Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, 2017). Recent novels are Lucida Intervalla (UWAP, 2018) and Hollow Earth (Transit Lounge, 2019). He often works in collaboration with other poets, artists, musicians, and activists. With Tracy Ryan he is the co-editor of The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry (2017). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University, Western Australia. He lives on Ballardong Noongar land at Jam Tree Gully in the Western Australian wheatbelt, and has also lived in the USA, UK and Ireland.

More by John Kinsella on Cordite Poetry Review →