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

‘Woman’s a dark continent,’ his hand
guiding a golden nib, wrote Sigmund Freud,
professor of the soul, that hinterland

you have to penetrate and find your void
to people with desire, the theatre
(Mercator’s word for map) where anthropoid

and can-can dancer grunt-whirl-laugh together
among humming birds, melting in time,
bristly groin to delicate suspender,

the Empire with red velvet seats and lime
light and the legs and Rule Britannia bit,
which are, I know, what make the paradigm

of the exotic body I inherit -
Mum in panto with high boots as Jack,
Mum singing Bill at Margate where I sit

and watch the spotlight in my head far back
here in the dark. Pale Pierrots. Concert party,
minstrels with white faces made-up black.

A chorus girl’s abstract geometry
bestrides his oceans with her fishnet thighs,
our Circumnavigator constantly

invoking his fixed stars. Which are her eyes.
They mark his longitudes whatever voodoo
dancer takes her place in her disguise

of flesh. None of these ghosts, I know, is you,
Patience, swerving round chairbacks in a bar,
round tables, shoulders, swooping plate of stew

and rice and plantain in each hand, or Star
beers flat down, to fizz cold smoking open...
Although, of course, of course, of course, they are,

aren’t they? And that’s our depth, just as this token
of the empty English pronoun I
pronounce is the same pronoun that is spoken

to the dead, or fills a singer’s cry,
or was once substituted for the name
some barque of Injun gold was guided by