John Kinsella

1.

In a darkness without chemi-luminescence
to challenge definition, no space
for comparison, tremors unsettled
the bricks, but not enough
to bring the walls down,
implode the chambers.

Beneath the house
with its antiques
and grand piano
ballroom opening out
like an invitation,
they enclosed.

Excavate, disinter, dig.
Exhume. Light fractures
and exchanges: heat, prayer.
So deep you wouldn't
have heard a sound uptop
when prisoners devolved
into apparently random gradations
of pitch. The throat
a battered flute.

Unfamiliar birds
made as game birds,
field-fattened,
shrill in the ovens:
the black warrior's skin
stretched against the wall.
Body-heat tarnishing
architecture, the space
beneath, within.

2.

As a child led through narrowing passages
to the chamber with manacles and an altar,
that first sound of harpsichord,
Goldberg variations. Down there,
a radio is static: nothing
comes in. Static is pater familias,
though the Church of England
sings here. A FLUX, luminary, organ glow, the form
     of the body: the pain and grief
     settled ritual prison life, a river beds
     and flows nearby, the seepage
     depths and whisperings
     caught in bricks, sand, stone.

3.

Father gave his sons transistor radios
when they first hit the market:
they heard America,
and the cousins visited that house again.
You should go there. We should
do it together. You'd be scared.
Voiceover. Lies. Submission.

4.

The country kitchen opened out,
small abundant gods gesticulated
from hot places, from the cool
of the cupboards. Heavy stone
and high roofs kept the driving summers
out: a stranger performed tricks
with fruit over the wooden floorboards.
He sang ballads. He dressed up -
sharp shoes, red dress, rouge -
and recited "The Man from Snowy River".

5.

Water damage. Speak trenched spirit,
impudent light of depth, pressure, crush.
Uptop sheep nudging at the garden.
An imported palm sways in the sear wind.
Speech in the morning. Evening sense
loses fathoms. We asked you here
to state your case: location,
coordinates. Movements
of the peoples.

6.

Accused, fruit falls
from the place of the eyes.
Lightning lit hilltops
and fire raced down. Below ground it was cool,
though they sweated. The house went up quickly.
Labyrinths of title deeds and planning permissions,
inheritance, death tax, changes in governments:
a compact whirlwind cut the garden,
cutting dates out of papers.
In the static it seeped in,
we know that all this is proof.
Proof: this theory, this transubstantiation:
the bells as confident as stone,
proof heard, turned to story.