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

A late shift in cool October, we tried a bath.
Her very first. It was Cleopatra-esque
two nurses undressing this adolescent

in the white tiled bathroom. Unhurried, precise,
we slid her thin arms from her top, passed her hands
from one of ours to the other, never relinquishing

the small electricity of contact. She didn’t struggle.
Not even when I let her go free for one second
to pick up her jeans. We studied the periphery

as we led her to water: the drugged grease of her gaze,
unshakeable arc of her torso, small fists
of breasts. Then focused on the middle distance,

conserving her transparent capsule
of privacy. She was malleable, graceful.
So relaxed we could have rolled her out

in the hot water like silk and pegged her to dry.
She slid down the porcelain to condensation
and sweat and lay, breathing, satisfied.

The wet weed of hair bothering her face,
her hands too doped to connect. We rested our arms
on the side; the steam rose; her starved pelvis

emerged from the water in a crisp bluish line.
And she went under. I saw her face
contort as she inhaled. We grabbed her arms,

but she slipped through our grasp. As she thrashed
her legs the force she’d garnered in water
met the excruciating lightness of air

and she almost flipped over. Her mind’s
one living note riffling the world for an exit
as a prisoner is alert to the envelope of air

from a window. A religious tenacity. But
her lungs smarting and wringing themselves
like hands, and her legs, as we cradled her

and the bath swallowed its load, kicking
like a new-born lamenting
the apparent desertion of gravity.