Graphology Survival 16: phasmid in the cold firebox

In the cold firebox unflamed for seven months
a pile of soot rests on the ashbed: chimney,
shaken in the hot rainless summer winds,
has deposited its sad carbon history.

And at a tangent to this lampblack circle
centering a powdery gray square, a stick insect
looking like a piece of unconsumed York gum twig,
that specific, fresh as if just arrived to pause, consider.

In slow pursuit of eucalypt leaves, the subject
had been lifted in the heat and found its way down
the funnel into the firebox, the human in-camera,
glass blastdoor closing out a predicate.

So alive, I’d swear life-in-death, but so dead to handle,
to lie down outside in the cold openness under trees
it likely fed on so many stick insect years
ago—poised as the disguised stretch through growth

of death’s bizarre materialism: body, cryptic
preservation, the sudden falling apart of mimicry.
And the temerity of a gentle hand saying,
There go I but by the grace of… body mimicking
         ash disturbed, dispersed.


John Kinsella’s new book of poetry is Insomnia (W. W. Norton, 2020). He is a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and emeritus professor of literature and environment at Curtin University, Western Australia.