Coming out with your clutch of postcards
in a Tate gallery bag and another clutch 
of images packed into your head you pause
on the steps to look across the river 

and there's a new one: light bright buildings, 
a streak of brown water, and such a sky 
you wonder who painted it - Constable? No: 
too brilliant. Crome? No: too ecstatic - 

a madly pure Pre-Raphaelite sky, 
perhaps, sheer blue apart from the white plumes 
rushing up it (today, that is, 
April. Another day would be different 

but it wouldn't matter. All skies work.) 
Cut to the lower right for a detail: 
seagulls pecking on mud, below 
two office blocks and a Georgian terrace. 

Now swing to the left, and take in plane-trees 
bobbled with seeds, and that brick building, 
and a red bus...Cut it off just there, 
by the lamp-post. Leave the scaffolding in. 

That's your next one. Curious how 
these outdoor pictures didn't exist 
before you'd looked at the indoor pictures, 
the ones on the walls. But here they are now, 

marching out of their panorama 
and queuing up for the viewfinder 
your eye's become. You can isolate them 
by holding your optic muscles still. 

You can zoom in on figure studies 
(that boy with the rucksack), or still lives, 
abstracts, townscapes. No one made them. 
The light painted them. You're in charge 


of the hanging committee. Put what space 
you like around the ones you fix on, 
and gloat. Art multiplies itself. 
Art's whatever you choose to frame.