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

I

A shoulder greets me as I enter,
a raised clavicle... Already I centre
on a part, but isn't that what we do -
our eyes immediately taken by a tattoo,
a strand of hair that's out of place,
as if there were an ideal, a state of grace
for any attribute, never mind the body whole?
You can only hear a cellist bowl
a single note or chord at a time down the pitch
of the full tune, and before you feel the itch
to get behind the notes, each run must sound
right. Her feet are raised from the ground
on a dressed wooden block. One ankle
is damaged; a spot of blood won't rankle
for it forms a highlight in my painting.
To single it out avoids acquainting
myself with the grief of the harsh deed
which caused it. Grief, the word I need
for the overtone of Biblical sorrow,
is a sore on a line of verse, leave till tomorrow
any real emotion. Real emotion, I repeat
to conjure an element up, can be discreet,
but I can't see her as a sum of her parts
until her body expresses itself in heart to hearts
with me, and any feeling I have for her
must wait for the cello to become a blur
of one tune, her snuffle to be part of the cold
that will rack me and complete the mould.

II

To trace a line from toe to knee to hip
and then in a long convex sweep
to a pointed elbow is to delineate
a recumbent figure glad to let light
do the work for the class who's paying.
She can't stand us using her, spying
on her most intimate parts in the name
of art, she wants the money all the same.

The ring in her nose shouts "Fuck you"
but she attempts to play down the blow
it can still cause those who don't know the form -
so pins and needles in her right arm
is only a bloody nuisance. She has to shake
it, but doesn't enough. Every prick's a prick
too many. She should have clenched her fists.
Might as well cure appetite with fasts.

III

If you sit around a naked body sketching
and reproduce its contours exactly
is it your sketch you most admire or the wretched
girl you've enjoyed quite matter of factly?

IV

W - a random start. Plucked from the air.
W - the start of questioning.
Doubled-up - her posture.

In her shell. Her shell ear-ring
scintillates like sun on water.
Her stomach's a delta of stretch-marks

- do they spell M for mother?
She's running to mud on her soles.
She is the first letter of shell.

This way up, the tattoo is W
with Arabic extras. She'll tell me the word.
As an aside. An O word.

W on its side resembles a 3:
bare trunk on bare thigh on bare leg.
Bare arm makes an A if nose is the bar.

When do you adopt a posture like this?
Only if your world's at its end.
Already her feet are asleep.

W is the start of World. One world.
Pluck yourself back to life.

V

You are a landscape, a building, a still life.
No, you are none of these. Landscapes are not perturbed
by a random fly. Buildings stand expressionless.
Still lifes have a stillness you could never have,
however still you stand. The way you clasp
the top of that wooden chair, the way you centre
your gaze on a tangible beyond that must be
miles from any studio, the way you go there
and make the place your own, are how our eyes work.
We clasp you in lines and shading, woodenly maybe,
we see, or would wish to see, into and out with you
tangibly, giving you a beyond (what presumption!)
and that is where, with luck, we conjure you up
a you out there, a whole body on paper here.

You've probably stripped us in your mind.
You're imagining our many blemishes and can find
more than we knew we had. Any we see on you.

VI

Tornadoes come closer with their cacophony
than you do, a thunder to your calm.
Their line of flight hellish monotony
for pilots; the folds across your midriff
more swirl and eventful for me,
your breasts playing hide and seek them, your qualm
at how these artists may draw them stiffening
you. You'll damn well keep the folds tauter
than the lines constantly running
between the artists' eyes and your body - lines,
still alive life lines,
getting shorter
and shorter.

VII

The incommunicable sadness in your eyes
as you lie back and look up in a deckchair - no surprise
about that - but the upcurve
of your neck cannot help but emphasise
it without reserve.
The incommunicable sadness in your eyes
then distracts me from the rise
and fall of your breasts and the nerve
we have to expect you to epitomise
a sunbather and deserve
no respite from the drilling of our eyes.

The skylight sun started to shine on
you in this position and your jaded
mode; the stretched deckchair canvas looked fine on
your perimeter until, even as we watched, it faded.

VIII

Your breasts are not speaking to one another.
They face different ways, make their point
separately, but like many a sister and brother,
even ones who fall out when life is out of joint,
their areolas tell a similar story,
especially when they stand out with how they feel,
the left one humming OM, the right one the glory
of being human, fallen, outward-looking, real.

IX

Your left elbow is pointing at your navel.
Let it stay there and why not fall asleep?
Your legs are crossed and all ten toes
are pointing my way, Let them keep
their even temper and cross to us - bare feet
on a sunny beach and the sea flowing...
You yawn and close your eyes, don't see
the coastguard signal to the lifeboat going
off to rescue a girl out of her depth
in the whirls we've made of her - here
she can't touch bottom, there her left elbow
is a finger pointing out the pitfalls - all sheer.
Let's wake her - here's the fly to save
us the trouble. Come back to us from the deep.