Three Poems by Tim Turnbull

Colossal Stone Head

In the top paddock behind the new-builds
they have unearthed a colossal stone head.
It was found, of course, by chance, by a fluke
when some ornamental cocker spaniel
pooch-opera wannabe started digging
and barking in that clichéd Liddle Timmy’s
trapped in the abandoned mineshaft style
during investigation of an animal hole
and persisted with the attention seeking
until its curious owner trotted home
to fetch gloves and a garden spade which jarred
resonantly against something solid
and after frantic scraping returned, stunned,
to the village. It’s the real deal, as it goes,
got the whole imperious lip curl going on,
and the locals traipse up from their homes
to observe the haughty basalt visage
and see how work progresses and then,
of an evening, gather, in the beer garden
or at the sports field, to speculate on
its origin, mutter competing theories.
There is no appetite for calling in
the authorities. The builder, for one,
is against, anticipating a lengthy
inquiry, great drain on the exchequer,
and much busy-bodying by bureaucrats
and quasi-functionaries. Beyond these
pragmatics, though, perplexity reigns:
What does it mean? What does it mean
to decent people accustomed to thinking
themselves recently fallen, fully formed,
from a children’s primer called The Modern
World published no more than a generation
and a half ago and for whom the glass
chopping board marks the pinnacle and end
of necessary technological progress?
Its sneer betrays a cruel disposition
obviously out of place around these parts,
where everyone is affable to a fault,
and is suggestive of alien lineage.
Did it arrive by natural processes?
over thousands or ten thousands of years,
by glacial deposition, perhaps?
or was it transported by long since repelled
intruders? or as the habitual
neb-pokers suggest, plundered in a time
when the country was more expansionist
in its outlook? A few of the more outré
hypotheses, involving the paranormal
or spaceships, are denounced in short order,
but nonetheless contribute to a growing
sense, novel and pervasive, of unease,
a subtle apprehension that causes folk
to look over their shoulders mid-sentence,
to glance up the hill without realising
that it’s towards the squat, massive idol.
Unawares, though, they are taking it on
as their own. The primary school children,
with a gleeful eagerness, undertake
head related projects, make papier mâché
replicas and sneering jack-o’-lanterns;
these are soon enough incorporated
into the village fête, lead a parade,
which, on the basis of no evidence,
is accepted as longstanding tradition.
A ceremony is contrived, flowers laid
at astronomically auspicious times.
It couldn’t remain secret for very long,
could it? And you know what will happen next,
don’t you? It is entirely predictable.

Ghost Ship

In the umbrous gloom of the North Atlantic
a familiar but indistinct shape glides,
slipping quietly between ice bergs and floes.

No one sees it pass. Lookouts of warships
and cargo vessels alike turn away
while sonar registers nothing at all.

Under the surface, bathyscaphe footage
confirms a soundlessly decaying hulk,
iron plates and bulkheads crumbling in salt,

obscured by algal blooms and encrustations,
host to rubbery, dead-eyed brutish things,
home to scuttling, awful armoured things,

to gape-mawed, glaring murderous fish,
flittering gills, shells, fronds and tendrils.
All this the grainy images attest,

but they say that it is all a put up,
that the They, the big They, have orchestrated
a massive hoax to nefarious ends

the nature of which is unclear at this time
and the real liner never sank and remains
at large, sailing unseen from Nunavut

to Bermuda and Diego Ramirez
with a multifarious company
of mystical adepts, or deposed tyrants,

or plutocratic arch-manipulators.
And all these manifestations exist
at once or in serial or not at all

competing for elbow-room in your brain
which is like the sea, superabundant
with the writhings of the animate dead.

Black and White

We are making moving pictures.
It is the silver age again.
We are crafting aery vignettes
from light and distilled emotion,
bleached ethereal pageants
on sun-baked backlots
from geometry and gesture.
Grips and sparks scurry
between sound stage and warehouse
ferrying rig and tracks;
administrators and functionaries
shuttle memos and redrafts;
auteurs and focus pullers compose
tableaux suffused with tenderness
or despair, or both; but in
screening rooms the rushes spill
monochrome, which spreads
out from the screen and infects
the whole studio lot and in
a trailer the principal lights
a cigarette. Properly framed and set,
a thread of pale smoke twines
over white cheek and black hair,
and this chiaroscuro masterwork
reveals itself as the film within
the film within the film and so on
ad infinitum until we can
no longer say what is the art
and what is life but isn’t it all
so utterly beautiful. Clack
goes the clapperboard. Start
again.

Tim Turnbull is the author of three collections and several pamphlets of poetry. He lives in Scotland where he writes, paints, and rides around on a motorbike.