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Picture 13534357, digital image, with thanks to Tom Gillmor, image copyright Mary Evans References: Art (1994), a play by Yasmina Reza, and White on White (1913) and Black Square (1915), paintings by Kasimir Malevich.

Oil on Canvas
by John Wright

 

Uneasy, not a wedding

white, nor sterile scrub.

One tries to focus,

catching moonspace

imperfections, shallow shadows,

mere hint of tone or colour

gestating on the retina.

Miasma forms, and

dissipates across the iris.

Are those amoeba, dancing?

Down, and further down

Into the imagination

a cloud is born,

begins to grow,

becomes a starling

murmuration poised above

a windblown

winter marsh,

now reaching out,

now throbbing,

then collapsing like a circus tent,

playing with perception.

The eye craves a reference,

resolves a rural Bruegel

landscape, but why

the hovering Maigret pipe

– or do I mean Magritte?

A wash of tidal scum

not white at all

erases that

and gently strokes

a Seurat picnic

in its place

Those birds again.

In gloom the flocks settle for the night –

into that “Black Squareâ€

by Malevich.

 

 

© John Wright

Picture 13534357, digital image, with thanks to Tom Gillmor, image copyright Mary Evans

References: Art (1994), a play by Yasmina Reza, and White on White (1913) and Black Square (1915), paintings by Kasimir Malevich.

 

 

John Wright is thrice retired – firstly from being a pilot, secondly from a career in advertising, and most recently, as a lecturer in marketing and business at international universities. Apart from a twenty-five year interlude, he has been writing poetry since his teens, and suddenly rediscovering his muse about ten years ago, he says he now just can’t stop, and recently gained an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at The University of Kent, Canterbury. From choice, he writes about the sea (he keeps a small yacht in The Solent), landscape (he flies microlight aircraft and gliders over Sussex), the fragility of human relationships (his third, and “final†wife has also been three times married), and such political issues that have him raging over his breakfast newspaper. From October to June he lives on the edge of Eastbourne, in sight of the South Downs, and – on tiptoe – the sea, and in summer he decamps to his ‘Shed’ in southern France. He believes he may still have four grown-up children, and four grandchildren, but you know how it is, they never phone, rarely call back, and have always already made other arrangements for Christmas.

 

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