That Bright Grey Eye

The grey sky, lighter & darker greys, lights between & delicate lavenders also blue-greys in smaller strokes, & swashes of mauve-grey on the Hudson— openings of light to the blue oblong off-center where the door to the warehouse shows— the larger smearings darkening deep into blues So alight that sky, late August, early evening, I had to gasp at it, stand there hardly moving to breathe it,       using whatever my body gave me, at that moment       attending to it, thinking: Turner, he should have seen it, he would have given it back to us, not let it die away And that other evening, walking down Bank Street from marketing, the sky fiery over the river, luminous but hot in its flowering also, rich in color as Venice seen by Guardi—more aflame even, the sky moving in a pulse, its fire breathing in a pulse verging on danger—mane of a lioness affronted. That brilliance—the eye of the lion filled to the lids with flame And his eyes, Turner's, that bright grey eye at seventy-six, "brilliant as the eye of a child" who grew his thumbnail in the shape of an eagle's claw, the better to use it in painting In Kirby Lonsdale, Yorkshire, where Turner first drew mountain-landscapes, I found Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell