James Berry
Stories by Bodyparts
1
I'm your breath-smell at waking.
I report your return from silence.
Use me in first kisses on children.
Use me in smiles on good-morning.
2
We are your eyes, your windows
on altitude and depth,
on faces hiding messages.
Sometimes we see
elevations unite levels.
Usually, horizons are fixed.
Blood boils us often
more than curved hips.
Bareness calls down hoods
yet you want to see the loving
next door: we wonder
what bird could be singing.
We wonder, to whom
could we expose we care.
3
We are your feet. We rubbed
away your baby tantrums
into leg-shapes of clockhands.
We stand at doorways:
no last abode anywhere.
Obsessed with wings, you make us
go about in traps.
We climb we fall.
We linger it hurts.
If you laugh or kiss, always
we are way at the end.
We dash for the bus, your
destination's eyes, high up
at its rear, laugh at us
and disappear. Then at last
we face outwards, like
clothes-irons rested
going colder and colder.
We see: no bath was ever able
to soak away our travels.
4
I am your hand. I hang
lightly or become a stone.
Agent of eyes and heart
I pull triggers.
I stroke up love.
I wrap up weapon.
Good cash or bad or its absence,
all arrive for pocketing.
And as this ladling palm,
I take a nail driven through me.
But like a leaf, I wave,
I shiver,
I shrivel,
I slip away.
poetrymagazines' note: Reproduced with the permission of Bloodaxe Books. This poem appears in the Bloodaxe collection by James Berry A Story I Am In: Selected Poems (pub. 2011).
Page(s) 47
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