Stephen Ratcliffe
Poems from HUMAN / NATURE
11.17
silhouette of song sparrow perched on fencepost below feederin left foreground, sunlit green oval of tobacco plant leaf
across from it, sweptback wingspan of jet passing overhead
man on left explaining “the moment an emotion or fact is
transformed into a photograph, is it no longer a fact”
man on right asking “did Picasso consider the paintings
finished when he had them photographed, and if he changed
his mind in one or two instances, then why”
plane of high
thin white cloud reflected in the motionless grey plane below
point, gull standing on triangular orange tip of the GROIN sign
11.18
black-capped chickadee pecking up seeds from table in right
foreground, golden-crowned sparrow landing on tobacco plant
branch above it, grey-white fog in front of invisible ridge
man on left noting “the eye also distinguishes better the so-
called middle greys, which to photography are often flattened”
man across from him adding “‘white water is inconceivable, etc.’
means we cannot describe how something white would look, don’t
know what description these words demand of us”
white line
of jet trail slanting across cloudless blue sky above point,
blue-green shoulder of wave breaking to the right below it
11.20
yellow circle of sun below silhouette of black pine branch,
blue jay pecking seed from feeder across from it, sweptback
wingspan of jet passing overhead
woman on phone explaining
“‘writer’ and ‘writing’ come from Anglo-Saxon word for ‘weave,’”
for example “the red gaze weaves in and out with morning light”
woman in black sweater asking “have you noticed how adjectives
have become ‘marginalized,’ I’m just waiting for the Buddhist
couple to arrive, corporate crooks are fucked”
sunlit line
of white cloud in pale blue sky above the ridge, oval green
mouth of wave breaking to the left across channel below it
11.23
pink line of jet trail moving across blue whiteness of sky
in left corner, right-sloping shoulder of still dark ridge
below it, sound of waves breaking in channel
man on left
wanting to “demonstrate a gradual stepping up and down
between white and black, between lighter and darker”
Kandinsky recalling that “Van Gogh asked, in his
letters, whether he might not paint a white wall
dead white”
white of spray blown back from wave
breaking across channel, whiteness of gulls moving
to the left across shadowed plane of ridge above it
11.24
sunlit edge of egg-shaped rock on rectangular white table
in left foreground, green of passion vine-covered fence
behind it, sweptback wingspan of jet passing overhead
Kandinsky noting “the whole triangle is moving slowly,
almost invisibly forwards and upwards”
man on right
explaining “the spacing seems bound up with an effort
to alter the visual weight of the larger right-angled
triangle that had, at Sorgues, lorded it over the picture”
silver of low sun reflected in blue-grey plane, whiteness
of tern flapping across cloudless blue sky toward horizon