Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

« Previous item
Contents of this issue
Next item »

M. J. Martin

print this page

Turner's Owl

Turner’s world was a shadow the light
cast when void shone upon it. Birth spasms
dilating his pupils, he saw that the one
void deserving of dread is the absence
of absence itself, solar abcess
where concepts, like bands of the spectrum, confuse
to a brilliant blank. And he painted
its portrait, an owl’s face, the real
owl whose gaze has been known to dissolve
those who wander its glade for too long.
Choose one paint-fleck on which to
zoom in, and what explodes
at you is any of the scenes he haemorrhaged:
the dying battleship, the abbey
wall eroded by a constant
wash of sun, the hare about to shatter into
sparks beneath steam engine wheels, all shape
the omnitype they aren’t and are –
some objects of its scrutiny. A hooting
locomotive whose twin-lamps blaze
beams of darkness, the regard it issues
worldward must be tenebrous as our lives seem
in contrast to void, though this void is no more
than the shadow of Turner himself,
and its radiant wingspan grows
dim in the whites of his eyes. What illumes
from behind him is time, which shines out of
the mould on the battleship’s timbers, the hare’s
misting breath, and the lichen escarpment without
which the abbey would fall. Each minutia strikes
out as a talon with which the owl seizes
attention, consuming us, poems and all.

 

Page(s) 101

Back to top