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5/27/14

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.

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