To make it clear, I don’t think there’s anything mystical about “ghosts”—they are an isness. There’s no secret code or system of access, and they are there whether you want them to be or not. They are enjambments within your narrative. Take an act like walking up the gravel driveway, up the face of the valley, a semi-zigzag. The incline means you enter layers of atmosphere at a certain angle per pace and height. It is atmospheric, you buffer with ghosts of magpies in that way. What choice will I have but to hang around here when I am gone? I am confident I will be sensitive to those passing through me
regarding how much of me they do or don’t want contact with. I might have to rise into the troposphere for sociopolitical reasons, and out of ecological concern. I will try not to act as glitter, but I naturally reflect solar heat back into space. I have no agenda other than letting things grow without my umbra, for my ghost not to block spirits whose place this is.
About the Author:
(Excerpt is taken from; https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-kinsella)
Australian John Kinsella has written over 20 books of poetry, as well as plays and fiction; he also maintains an active literary career as a teacher and editor. Kinsella’s poetry is both experimental
and pastoral, featuring the landscape of Western Australia. Paul Kane observed in World Literature Today, “In Kinsella’s poetry these are lands marked by isolation and mundane violence and by a terrible transcendent beauty.” Kinsella’s recent books include Firebreaks (2016), Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (2016), Insomnia (2019), and the critical work Legibility: An Antifascist Poetics (Palgrave, 2022).