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Tim Cumming

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Foot, face, fist

We’d make love gently,
and then recklessly, pulling together
like cells at the moment of conception.
Afterwards she’d guide my hand over her belly
and say “feel” and I’d press my palm over the head
of our child, or was it the back, the foot, the fist?
I couldn’t tell which part of the future we were feeling.
It had swollen from the knot in her belly to something
almost life-size, like the vision of a third eye.
The future was coming inch by inch,
making itself up as it went along,
pooling its resources, breaking waters.
Soon her tiny head would crown.
We were weeks away from zero station,
and packed, prepared like an arctic mission.
She lies awake in her animal skin
guides my hand with an inward look, backlit
and faintly ghosted. I think of the image of the foetus
rising and falling on the hospital monitor,
the steady light of the cardiovascular machine
like the tip of a burning cigarette.
There’s a unified theory for all this,
like seeing the world in headlights.
but where do you stop? When the ship comes in?
When the money runs out? And where does life really begin?
I’d lie beside her, unpicking a thread from the hem
of her dress that led me back to the tuck and fold,
the tongue and groove of her golden vagina.
Her beacon on fire. I’d feel her again,
the place where the kicking starts.

 

Tim Cumming’s first collection, Apocalypso, was published by Stride in 1999. Poems from it feature in the Forward Anthology for 2001 and in the forthcoming Best of the last decade of the Forward Prize.

Page(s) 55

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