Jonathan Minton
Landscape: On Charles Tomlinson
Not knowing where to
begin, the eye begins
by chance.
A field opens, articulating
space. In a place un-named
the eye empties, then grips
shapes suggesting themselves-
rock tips and slag heaps
rise, and rising, dissolve
into cloud heads delineating
bird skull and shell, a dispensation
not less hospitable
than an Eden, the clarity
of change before madman
Adam named it
into static certitude.
In this shifting landscape-
exact as the sea, where water
writes and rewrites shorelines,
the eye
relates each shape with
all that it is not,
distinctions
of point and counter-
point, release, and replenishment-
a chance to begin
again.
Jonathan Minton is from Buffalo, NY and has recently published poetry in such journals as Sugar Mule, Moria, Seems, White Pelican, and Apples and Oranges. His chapbook Lost Languages was published by Longleaf Press in 1999. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the poetics program at SUNY-Buffalo.