Читать книгу Match - Helen Guri - Страница 9

It isn’t I who peers at the draft of this atlas through beer goggles,

inking it like a patient for quackery,

but a stumbling double, dead ringer with a widget set

of slashes, hyphens, dashes en and em mincemeating the margins, hinterlands.

Exactly the kind of guy you wouldn’t want operating

on you or heavy machinery,

he skinny-dips his gloveless thumbs

in the ebb and pulse of copy, stutters to the moat:

This won’t hurt a bit.

Meanwhile, languidly, with subtle difference, I

illuminate the consonants of coccyx on diagrams of the female pelvis in my turret with the bird’s-eye view,

just as Greta the Publicist, Dragoness-in-Chief,

interrogates the hair on our neck of the woods:

‘Seeing anyone these days, Robert?’

If I could split, I would – From the neck down, it’s all machine, claims a codger in a box on a dog-eared page. Siege ladder, I could footnote, brew a pot of black gold to the smoke point

and sip, and drip on her slingback shoe,

slug another gulp of my Hypocrite Oath:

creosote, no sugar.