On Hearing a Recording of Emily’s Waterfall
‘I know not how it falls on me,
This summer evening, hushed and lone’
Emily Brontë
‘on a day of sun and showers at Haworth’
Lucy Dougan with Tim Dolin
Analogue raw water de nos jours
spilling through
rock-grass-height nexus
exposing anterior
edges weathering
ravine where volume
of spill fluctuates to retune
chiffchaff interludes,
steady till it lessens.
Lightning Ghosts
I sense them in the air
when it’s said there’s
little or no chance
of a storm — they
are apostrophes
to themselves,
shaped like
diacriticals.
This is a mundane
observation to offer
up when the flash
closes the light out —
that loss of speech
to pyrography.
Their leaders
follow and tap me —
phantom-spark
biochemistry.
I sense them
as hexagons —
an empty honeycomb —
stress per force and area.
How many euphemisms
can they sustain? Star picket.
Roof overhang. Plane wing.
Metal drum. Wheat crops.
Unable to reach the ditch
in time.
The forests
I worship
harbouring
lightning.
John Kinsella is a poet, novelist, critic, essayist and editor. He is a Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.