Andrew Duncan
Vertical Features Made Out
Vertical Features Made Out
Flying at 1000 feet to shoot a film magazine
wings level to secure the match-ups,
making serial scans as flat as sized paper,
dreaming of tracing heat and moisture,
shooting air instead of ground.
Clean and sweet unresisted
swoops from horizon
to horizon of the earth
shouldering all kinds of wear.
Down, on a looted table with back-lighting,
exposures with overlaps sanded and glued,
a patience that shows how space joins to itself.
Allover soft skin feeling of the green beloved earth.
Rivers in summer reduction crimped to ideal curves.
Subjectivity washing over the returns of light
like winged insects too fine for the lens to resolve
like haze or swallows.
Top-head-on pinpoint sharp
reduced to the head of a pin,
a whole gulp of depleted recognition.
Recovering by looking,
an aerial world forced back into terrestrial language.
Headstocks lost in foreshortening given
back by the detail in their shadows.
Parallel flight of a starling, in its month, from the sea,
sailing its eye over blocks of territory
the signs of the good land caught, as seen:
visual rhyme with a new home
& I could be happy here
— the signal to dive into the expanding picture.
Suspended in the long scans of exposure
snatched up in the view the rain sees
walking the beams of air and light
Sweeps at right angles to line of flight
reveal the extents of what was fantasized
chain of halation along watercourses
vertical features made out.
The sheer scale
picking out structure in the subsoil,
anatomy raising a colour contrast
where light falls straight and glare
is read-back as reflexivity of smooth surfaces.
A pyramid of earth reveals itself in the direction of flight
the lost site’s
relief sharp in the stereoscopic lenses
looming through ground cover emaciated by heat.
A giant structure, an anomaly of the countryside
surfacing through a dark sea,
last recorded in the 13th C
& a speckled blur might be a flock of birds.
The horizon tells us what we are
visual cues recalling sets of actions
a dome filled and emptied by light.
Hanging over the desired land
losing scale in the footloose sky,
losing zone to plunge back through time.