Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

  Not girls – but beings
of matter beyond compare –
  lucent, sensitive,
flesh of crystal, absurdly
unstable, domes of drifting

  silks, with hyaline
tiaras, long lianas
  shivered all over
in racing ripples, fringes
and flounces they furl,

  unfurl, overturn,
change shape, take flight, as fluid
  as the massed fluid
that compresses them, weds them,
uplifts them in all their parts,

  gives way to them at
the slightest inflection and
  restores them to shape.
In the incompressible
plenitude of water that

  seems to offer them
no resistance, these creatures
  benefit from some
ideal motility –
relax within it, recover

  all their radiant
symmetries. There is no ground,
  nothing solid for
dancers of the absolute;
no flooring – but a theatre

  that can be leaned on
at every point, that gives
  way in whatever
direction they choose to
take. – Nor in their crystalline

  elasticities
do there exist any bones,
  articulations,
invariable jointings,
countable segments . . .

  Never did human
dancer, woman aroused and
  drunkenly mobile,
racked by the poisons of her
overextended powers,

  the ardent presence
of gazings charged with desires,
  express her sex’s
imperious offerings,
the mimed invitation to

  prostitution’s calls
as does the Grand Medusa
  whose undulations
thrust through the flood of festooned
skirts she flourished and flaunts

  again and again
with a weirdly shameless and
  depraved insistence,
transforming herself thereby
into a dream of Eros;

  and then, suddenly,
casting aside all her vibrant
  flouncing finery,
her crinoline’s scalloped hems,
sinks back, exposing herself

  furiously wide
open – but all at once pulls
  herself together,
quivers, dispersing herself
within her own element,

  her montgolfière
ascending with her into
  luminous regions
of forbidden space, domain
of the day-star, and mortal air.