Annemarie Austin
Spectacle
The vague dreaming Bordeaux giantess Goya drew,
from her sternum upwards above the queuing crowd
whose profiles targeted her midriff as if she were
a glass-bottomed boat stood on end, and all to see inside;
the huge abstracted bonneted woman who looked out
to be eye to eye with upper-storey window sills
and birds in their nests in the trees, or seeing far more
than anyone past the curvature of the sea horizon:
she has gone through the people like going through
the corn in her great shoes; she has pressed herself
inside the exact embrace of the city gate; she has
augmented her tallness with the first hill she could find.
from her sternum upwards above the queuing crowd
whose profiles targeted her midriff as if she were
a glass-bottomed boat stood on end, and all to see inside;
the huge abstracted bonneted woman who looked out
to be eye to eye with upper-storey window sills
and birds in their nests in the trees, or seeing far more
than anyone past the curvature of the sea horizon:
she has gone through the people like going through
the corn in her great shoes; she has pressed herself
inside the exact embrace of the city gate; she has
augmented her tallness with the first hill she could find.
Annemarie Austin’s fifth collection, Back from the Moon, was published by Bloodaxe in 2003. Very: New and Selected Poems will appear early in 2008. A former winner of the Cheltenham Literature Festival Poetry Competition, she lives in Weston-super-Mare.
Page(s) 46
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