Three on yellowness
i
A January depression is arrested
by the realization that the air is
opaque
like
perception. It is cold, and a
low sun descends in inches towards a
distant chalk ridge. There are three horses
in the foreground, their breath hangs visibly
in the chill and thickening haze, then
dissipates. This is the play of light and space
and air in the cloudless fenland winter,
all a deep yellow. Space is not empty
but filled, up.
ii
September. Silhouettes appear as the
horizon darkens as cattle, sheep climb
the crags of a Scottish hill farm to stand
briefly atop the peaks like Olympic
victors. Lighter
here till
later. Somehow the same chill yellow
as before, as the earth turns, like it always
turns, never stops turning. The sky shades
from pale blue to lemon and to ochre.
Beyond the horizon more horizons, three
layers of hills, in progressively lighter
shades of yellow.
iii
Depth: a puffy white cloud against a far sky
of pink-yellow, if such a colour possible.
I mean a yellow ground with pink brush
strokes delicate over the surface and faintly
visible,
just faintly
visible. If I am alone here it is only because
I told you that I preferred to walk on my own today,
or because you were busy with something,
or anything like that. Anything like that.
.
white cloud on grey, electrical
The use of sharpened flint to cut the flesh of beasts predates
the knowledge of fire. Sabre-toothed tigers were a feature
of the landscape for they, who may have slept on small
islands for safety, on some accounts. These
ancient ones, did
they dream? At the
prelude to history,
suffer nightmares?
Fear of spiders is sometimes explained as an evolutionary
adaptation and what a grand suggestion that the weight
of ages anchors my giddy terror at these spindly kitchen
beasts. Dread kindled
in the fires
of deep time,
more than antique:
génétique.
Fight or flight is a reasonable response to a sabre-toothed tiger
and to a domestic spider (so much smaller than me but so
many more eyes). In a sense I am a million years old and
through the window of the train I see giants marching out
across the land as of old: electricity pylons, arms outstretched,
all the way to the horizon;
like steel tigers
they’ll kill you
too if you try
to ride them.
.
Simon Ravenscroft lives in Cambridge, England. He is a Fellow of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge, where he teaches and writes in the arts and humanities. Recent poems of his have appeared, or will soon, in Meniscus, Red Ogre Review, Trampoline Poetry, and Swifts & Slows Quarterly, among other places.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 