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

Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

« Previous item
Contents of this issue
Next item »

Bill Broady

print this page

Don Juan and the Bodyguard

We met on the one day when,
Car snowfast, you moved among mortals.
I’d forgotten feet, you said,
Blueing toes next to my Scarpas.
Like Graves, I always recognise
The Goddess - incarnated
Now as a Police Bodyguard,
Hair in a Prime Suspect cut,
Rowanberry lips, zinc-white face on
An eighteen-tube fast-tanned body.
A wallet photograph: you, décollété
And wired, blazing-eyed, Janus-
Hinged with your golem oppo,
Shadowing Princess and Fat Tenor’s
Radiating smiles: Fear?
Our servants will do that for us!

We trysted in limestone country,
You in a red wool coat like
A heart beating on inside
A mastodon skeleton.
First kiss in a sudden ghyll
Like Mantegna’s Gethsemane,
With rabbits at our feet, not tame
But blind, dying of the myx.
In the Dalesman’s Bar’s sparagmos
Of mixed salad and XB,
You said your life was just routine.
Mine was just routines: with
Hall & Oates and Sein Und Zeit
Blarneying you bedwards.

Then you drew your gun, grey and huge,
Chambered with Mon Rouge lipsticks.
Poets are wrong to metaphorize your weapons -
Double-axe as butterfly-soul
Although your kitschy missiles missed,
The empty air behind them killed.
And so I joined the Dis-ward march
Of laid-off bleeding lover-sons,
Epigones of epigones,
Footling, beyond generation.
And your world was clean again,
Tenebrous and silent
But for your hair’s twin blades scything
across your shining cheek-bones.

 

Page(s) 32-33

Back to top