On The Bridge of Towers, Spoleto, Italy, for Clodagh Smith, by Mary Moore

The Bridge of Towers (The Ponte Delle Torri, Spoleto), by J.M.W. Turner (UK) 1840-1845.

On The Bridge of Towers, Spoleto, Italy, for Clodagh Smith
 
Turner’s all about the sun:
the “Ponte di Torri” depicts
not the disc but its lenticular
smear, yolk-yellow,
burgeoning over
the Roman aqueduct
whose four arches almost 
fade away, so light they are.
 
He borrowed the towers’ 
blue-gray from the river’s 
dawn shallows, 
or the Romans’ fog-coloured
metal mirrors, or the waning
souls whose passing
Renaissance
death scenes caught.
 
Maybe he mimicked the spiritus
the ancients thought carried eidos,
little pictures the eye 
imprinted, to travel the vena cava
to the soul,
which lived, they thought,
in the heart’s knowing
chambers––how else
to imagine how seeing got in.
 
Yet when finally I stood
on that ridge, the stone aqueduct
had not yet metamorphosed
into vapour, spirit:
it still bore the eons’ 
weight, and light’s, 
and all that thirst
for seeing.

Mary Moore

Mary Moore has five books, three in the past three years, and has work forthcoming in Poetry and Orison's 2019 anthology. She is retired from all but writing poetry.  She was a professor at Marshall U in Huntington WV, where she lives with a philosopher and a cat...or perhaps those are the same beings....