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David Kennedy

On Reading John Kinsella’s Peripheral Light



Psychically speaking,
anything can be used
    to convert
the sleep of desire
to the sleep of choice
  and back
   then shuffle
so what you disguise in love
with you is what you see
   you get you see.

   Convolvulus
graphs it, or something close,
in wire mesh, and brambles too,
   their raw lines
   snagged on
plot and overgrowth
equally everywhere.
   To wake up
sharpened, like Smithson was,
to a fine sense of rust

as a fundamental
property of steel sets
   up language
as mode distressing mode.
Then the back comes off
pastoral: big valves
turn out to be the tanks
   and silos
dominating real lives,
coding generations.

   Coda
   It’s like this:
out on wheatlands wide stage
   in the shade
of a corrugated
   cylinder
Florizel is praising
   Perdita
who’s matching invoices,
   earpiece in
for market news, weather.


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