Lindsay Turner

POEM FOR LAURA MULVEY

He is a figure in a landscape—

He is a figure in a landscape

made for display of people speaking:

an amphitheater:      about

your hell, and hers, the child

in a pink t-shirt with a slogan,

the child with a smile on the brown old grass,

another smile gone down so far beneath

the face all turned to wrinkle

            no one should have

a face    

the sunlight gets

in every wrinkle     It was the day

the forsythia beside the ivy

bloomed along the way to work—

*

It is said that analyzing

destroys

     That is the intention

*

plays down the illusion

of screen depth: his

tends to be one-

dimensional, as light

and shade, lace, steam,

foliage, net, streamers

and so on reduce

the visual field

*

Demands a story

     Demands free speech

     Demands an afternoon

in spring, shouting

     Springtime:

a robin’s contour springs

     Or possible to stop and look

at things in isolation     Shock

of recognizing     roundness     yellow

streak behind the beak like eye contact

during a crowd’s dispersal

into a long and getting-longer evening—

*

but there’s more to say

about the forsythia:

arresting, permanent

in color, yellow at the end

of the winter we thought

wouldn’t, we “we” of

that season, now to see

is to be thrown, all

together, into it, new

season, a worse public,

changing and calls itself

contingency, and if

I stop to stare someone

is likely to knock into me

*

he is a figure

in a landscape

*

NOTE: go watch the films

*

then later I tried to draw

an I on the page of text—I mean

an eye—and I

couldn’t, I turned it

to a curving shell, arches

of amusement and curling

to protect some word beneath

*

            hence the spectator,

            lulled into a false sense

            of security, sees through

            his look and finds

            himself exposed as

            complicit, caught        

*

Demands a scene of recognition

brought outdoors     Was overwhelmed

by language:     Turn it off

I’d say     whose image has been

stolen    

                       The spring turned public

all of a sudden     Turn if off,

I’d say, preferring something

less open to the sun

of middle afternoons     opacity

of birdsong just repeating     body made,

the body made, the body made a spectacle:

only the idea of the body made a sound

of shape     

                   The end of someone else’s

old sad poem

                                    a spectacle,

a spectacle, a spectacle     of care

Lindsay Turner's poems have appeared in Lana Turner Journal, WebConjunctions, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, and elsewhere.  She lives in Charlottesville, VA.