Chainsaw
The seared flesh of wood, cut
to a polish, deceives: the rip and tear
of the chain, its rapid cycling
a covering up of raw savagery.
It is not just machine. In the blur
of its action, its guttural roar,
it hides the malice of organics.
Cybernetic, empirical, absolutist.
The separation of Church and state,
conspiracies against the environmental
lobby, enforcement of fear, are at the core
of its modus operandi. The cut of softwood
is deceptive, hardwood dramatic: just
before dark on a chill evening
the sparks rain out — dirty wood,
hollowed by termites, their digested
sand deposits, capillaried highways
imploded: the chainsaw effect.
It is not subtle. It is not ambient.
It is trans nothing. A clogged airfilter
has it sucking up more juice —
it gargles, floods, chokes
into silence. Sawdust dresses boots,
jeans, the field. Gradually
the paddock is cleared, the wood
stacked in cords along the lounge-room wall.
A darkness kicks back and the cutout
bar jerks into place, a distant chainsaw
dissipates. Further on, some seconds later,
another does the same. They follow
the onset of darkness, a relay of severing,
a ragged harmonics stretching back
to its beginning — gung-ho,
blazon, overconfident. Hubristic
to the final cut, last drop of fuel.
In the wheatlands of John Kinsella’s Western Australia, cultivation equals war. Perhaps it does everywhere: it merely looks like a kindlier exchange where climates are more hospitable.
Chainsaw, which first appeared in New Poems: Peripheral Light (2003), takes us uncomfortably close to one of the weapons, showing us the way it sounds and works and the kind of wounds it inflicts. Relatively short lines, three or four-stressed, with no stanza breaks, produce an almost tree-like, vertical visual structure: the lines, often enjambed, sometimes staccato, fluid but given to grainy stops and starts, suggest the hidden intricacies of the tree and the incursions of the saw.
There may be more metaphorical “kickback” here than is first apparent. Versification is traditionally compared to ploughing, with good etymological reason, but perhaps the motion of the chainsaw is equally indicative.
The poem begins by warning us to look beyond the cut wood’s smooth,
polished-looking surface to “the rip and tear/ of the chain, its rapid cycling/ a
covering up of raw savagery”. The savagery is expanded and politically contexutualised in the ensuing lines. It ranges from the “malice of
organics” to the anti-environmental “conspiracies” of agribusiness. Why is “separation of Church and State” included in the trinity of evils? Perhaps it’s a metaphor denoting the schizophrenia inherent in civilisation’s compartmentalisation, as applied to humans and their environment.
“Organics” may suggest pesticides, fertilisers, etc. based on vegetable or animal compounds: at the same time it invokes the word’s Greek origins – organikos, meaning machine or instrument. The pun on “cycling” (the chain of the
chainsaw literally recycles itself, and destroys the cycle-chain’s innocence) is a further example of the depth to the cuts Kinsella makes with his word choices.
The verbal layering may involve irony: that the wood is judged “dirty” by the human operatives is the result of its providing life support to the termite populations. The triple-patterning could become repetitive but doesn’t, perhaps because of its placing in the line and because it involves different parts of speech: “gargles, floods, chokes”, “boots,/ jeans, the field”, “gung-ho,/ blazon, overconfident”. Here, “blazon” is used as an adjective, with striking effect.
Finally, the chainsaws cease their activities for the night, but there is an ominous sense of their relentless tomorrows – which, of course, are humanity’s tomorrows. Chainsaws are us. And they will go on masticating the world, until all its resources are used up. Let’s hope the termites survive. We won’t – and nor do we deserve to.
Poem taken from Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems by John Kinsella, published by Picador at £16. It is available from the Guardian bookshop priced £13.59 including free p&p.