metamorphosis by bridget riley

Each month, TATE ETC. publishes new poetry by leading poets such as John Burnside, Moniza Alvi, Adam Thorpe, Alice Oswald and David Harsent who respond to works from the Tate Collection. Subscribe to the Poem of the Month RSS feed.

In April 2006 Lawrence Sail presented his poem based on Bridget Riley’s Metamorphosis, on display at Tate Britain from March 2006 – February 2007.





Considering Bridget Riley’s Metamorphosis

Here it is, in black and white –
the optic nerve seduced into playing
a blinder. Pressures out of sight
mill all images back to latency,
the mind’s series, treacherous and true.

Yet definitions are at their sharpest
when speeding towards the point where disks
of silver and black throng to the mesh
of something like judgement, then a remix
of tried perceptions, making them new –
as, say, the image of holes in a colander
themselves drained away; or a swarming stream
of fish-eggs; or a geometer’s world
of ciphers somehow unhooked from time,
an eternity made of in betweens.

Now you don’t see it, now you don’t –
the invisible ink which you know is there,
the oxygen of desire, which can’t
be denied; that gasp of mortal love, or
the momentary gift of all its meanings.