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The South Transept Window, St. Lucia at Lowhampton
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Who ever thinks this is impossible
shall only have a look on the glass, which is similar to you
— Monk of the Abbey of St. Mary and St. Nicholas at Arnstein,
late twelfth century, tr. by Roger Rosewell
1
In the high left light there’s a bombast figure
of the iconoclast Harley — titled
Chairman of the Committee for the
Demolition of Monuments of Superstition
and Idolatry — in operation mid 1600s.
In forgiveness is lightly engraved in the grisaille glass near the base.
His jig-on-coals is illumined to the foot:
in the light below, skin-fierce shards
of thousanded glass are oblite against an anvil road
black as a telly that’s off.
2
Here the sanctity of the inextinct is vitrified.
(There is in this, of course, the trick of the numinous,
which apertures the mind then shutters
it with a captured click.)
The second window is abstracted
into a green / yellow / red
that’s near tessellated at points,
yet at its edges approaching random generation
like a screen saver projected. It is infernal.
This color chart dispersal, that’s disordering or
reordering.
3
Then a spurt of leading leads out of the plaster tracery,
these cames a cooled ore rooting
Lowhampton’s industry to a silica-limed wall —
and the metal hid within a retrace
of all the city’s greatness
that’s gone before. Though now
is lost. There is at last the moving
off from the abstract; a tilting to the concrete:
it seems, right here, that a hundred
buildings are storied in stone-thrown perspective.
A city reinvented.
4
In four: a clear-paned gemmail
connecting like-to-like, with no change of tint
or shape, no supporting leadlight.
It’s as if it were a house window.
Or something from an office block.
It does not create or stain but gives an outside
falling past Sainsbury’s and the Sander Tower
looming, then the ring road communioned
traffic forming. An open room
pupiled towards rain in its rain-tone,
the study of an unaltared sun.
Source:
Poetry
(October 2014)
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This poem originally appeared in the October 2014 issue of Poetry magazine
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The South Transept Window, St. Lucia at Lowhampton
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Martin Monahan has recent work in (or forthcoming in) the London Review of Books, Australian Book Review, The Manchester Review, The Warwick Review, and elsewhere.
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