John Kinsella

"...meanwhile I found my body mutilated and one would have said that the
flesh had been plowed, and the sex sewn together and upright like an ear of
grain hardened and closed, and I looked at this first model from before the
fall enclosed inside a narrow cell into which the sun had penetrated..."

     --Philippe Sollers, [Derrida, Dissemination, 301]

The crop curves late spring
in taut waves that swing around
the stone house, windows boarded
and chimney sealed, birds
through wired eaves.
Skin-script, assemblage
all flails and tenterhooks,
these soles punctured
by burrs and seeds,
vestigial wire twists near fences,
in fire-breaks: but that's the fringe,
the shore, as through arteries
grazing goes, that s sound
as evening flicks the formulating grain,
the spiked ears, the head, the house
a residual claim;
salty springs, seepage,
the democratic self
draws particles; these bodily fluids
drained to keep weed
knocked down, crop ascendant,
prayer-book ticking against a wall;
s/he lost something t/here,
as cut off by the turning crop,
green-yellow, or the rip of a tin sheet
swinging nearby, closer, the sun stunningly
bright, welding the retina, pinpointing
the exact nerve, as just the open air
and the wheat and a verandah
might bring on masturbation:
because I, the farmer, might want to,
ants testing the cum: attracted,
caught up, how many of them?
A sperm for each one?
A cruel rejoinder.
The crop grows over
a place of castration,
though memory locks on:
roam [plupresent] roam,
saliva condensing at the dam's edge,
the birds imprinting:
crane egret spoonbill; these scratches?
from poison bush, this scar
with its jagged edges
and sickly pull through?
an olive tin cut through
to the warm interior, as warm as blood
flowing out, connecting,
subjected, unified, composed
as the crop remains closed,
locking landfall out
of the equation,
the comforts of house,
the protective casing?