journal for new poetry
Timothy Donnelly
Saint Bride
Duncan’s angels, whose red-black-pink and gold-green wings
exceed the margins of the picture plane and inch
out onto the decorative border, carry the sleeping body of the saint
across the Hebridean sea and back in time to Bethlehem where she
will be Mary’s midwife and Christ’s wet nurse. Her hands perch
on her chest in prayer, ghostlier even than the foot
of the angel who flies in front—its face (seen in full) directing our eye
to the face (in profile) of the saint, its toes likewise dipping
into the trim, which is of gold zig-zags, lozenges and dots on a thin
strip of brown, outlined in madder. Here one impossibility
dances with another, and another, and as decorously as waitstaff
at La Coupole in Paris, over which the angels might have passed if
they flew to the Nativity via the direct route. My guess is
they did not. My guess is angels place no premium on efficiency
when trucking in miracles. When I saw the picture in Edinburgh
I stared for half an hour before gathering the most human face in it
was the seal’s, and that it isn’t really a seal, but the artist himself
in seal form, or else how could he have known twin seagulls flew
along in retinue, that angels’ tunics are so wickedly emblazoned, or
which waves that night wove blue-green-blue with little bits of purple?