Spectral Limbs

Mottled legs & Titian’s Venus.

I

The bedroom has no window. White, peeling. I sleep and study the walls. Salt in my hair and on my lips. Mothwing evenings. I will memorise the room the way a cuttlefish memorises dark.

II

In dreams I’m running. I’m standing and I’m speaking. I’m dancing. I wake and I remember my body. I sink down.

III

I wait for the square of moonlight and listen to cats in the lane. My heart wakes before I do; it’s already running.

IV

The branches turn bare and I think they cannot possibly turn bare again, but they do. I watch them from the bathroom window as she washes my tangled hair. She tells me my body is beautiful. She says it like she means it. I look down at my spectral limbs in the water; it is beautiful and I realised too late. Beauty has betrayed me.

She drains the water and washes her hands.

V

I was Titian’s Venus. I walked past myself without looking.

VI

Caravaggio in the red heat of Naples. I wore a grey cotton dress and my body carried me through the streets and I didn’t thank it. Void and light, and a man chasing us down the road to offer us crème brûlée.

VII

Lucian Freud in London. Grey flesh, and my own mottled legs in the middle of December; I ignored them, then. Sirens. Two gunshots. I buy paracetamol and a spare pair of tights from the chemist and hit my toes to get the feeling back. The afternoon bleeds blue and we drink cider in the back of a dark pub.

VIII

I kiss people I shouldn’t. My lips are only lips.

IX

It is spring now. I eat pears and read your letters in the wet light. The world has ended and there is a window.

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