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

She wears the long series of wonder-awakening dresses,
She wears the fishskin cloak,
She wears the gown of pearl with the constellations pricked into its dark lining,
She undresses out of the night sky, each night of the year a different
                                                                                                sky,
She wears altitude dresses and vertigo dresses,
She plucks open the long staircase at the neck with the big buttons
of bird-skulls in the white dress of sow-thistle.
She has leather britches known to be chimp-skin,
She has combed star-rays into a shaggy night-dress,
She has a bodice of bone-flounces, a turbinal blouse through which
the air pours.
There is a gown she has that shimmers without slit or seam like the
                                                                                                 wall
of an aquarium:
A starfish moves slowly on its pumps across her bosom,
A shark glides, a turtle rows silently between her knees,
And she adopts in turn the long dress of sewn louse-skin,
The romper suit of purple jam packed with tiny oval seeds,
The foggy grey dress, and lapping between its folds
echo bird-cries and meteor-noises and declarations of love,
The ballgown of ticker-tape,
The evening dress of flexible swirling clockwork running against time, The cocktail dress of bloody smoke and bullet-torn bandages,
And the little black dress of grave-soil that rends and seals
as she turns.
Often she sits up all night in the philosopher's library
Sewing strong patches from his wardrobes of thought
into her wounded dresses.