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

First, the smell: formaldehyde. Then the eyes
dangling from their long white cords, pulled out
of a bag and dropped on our desks like pickled eggs.

There was a diagram in the textbook
and we learned to call this twisted cable
the nerve, as words struggled to supplant
the vividness of the uprooted organ, its
fatty string like a snail hooked out of its shell.

Now I want to recover the tang
of the preservative in my nostrils, as the eyes
of a whole herd of cattle stared from our desks
into the startled air of the classroom.

With our scalpels we unearthed
the flexing iris, which had the name
of a goddess and a flower. Through it you could see
rainbows if you held it up to the window.

Inside, it was stuffed tight as a golf ball with
clear jelly, and I thought of frogspawn
or the culture that congealed around
corned beef in a tin. I imagined the light

passing through it like the projector beams
that weaved over my head in the cinema,
full of smoke and shadow but still spreading
technicolour dynamation on the cornea’s screen.

My sister’s eyes, pearled with cataracts. The lens
of the telescope pressed against my eye as the moon
swam through clouds. The cow’s eye, warm
crystal ball, soft planetarium of the meadow’s stars.

I recall it now as I pull another pickled onion
out of the jar of vinegar, and feel its packed
round weight between thumb and forefinger,

as I slice it in two, exhuming the layers
pale as paper, wound one inside the other, seed
within seed, discovered by the inquisitive light
for the first and last time.