Poem
Tiffany Atkinson
PORTRAIT OF THE HUSBAND AS FARMERS’ MARKET
PORTRAIT OF THE HUSBAND AS FARMERS’ MARKET
PORTRAIT OF THE HUSBAND AS FARMERS’ MARKET
The husband is a mud-on-the-boots philosophyin old jeans, loving nothing so much as slow growth.
His thoughts are distinctively British cooperatives,
jovial stall-holders subbing each other loose change.
His chest is a trestle laid with rare meats, smelling
of the smokehouse, his belly a seed-loaf, knotted
and oddly exotic. The sex of the husband’s a plump
trout, a one-off, lolling silverside-up in its shine
for a wife with the eye of a magpie. His heart,
apparently a leafy crop, is a loom of many rhizomes
reaching furlongs – who knows how far? The husband
is mineral-rich, irregular, leaving scraps of himself
all over the street for starlings to pocket. Is a crowd
of bright skins in a bushel, wheels of feral cheese,
impossible brews from the ditches. Is the season’s
measure, taking the weather however it turns out.
© 2008, Tiffany Atkinson
Publisher: First published on PIW,
Publisher: First published on PIW,
Tiffany Atkinson
(Germany, 1972)
Tiffany Atkinson was born in 1972 in Berlin to an army family and lived in Wales for several years, when she moved to Cardiff to take an MA and PhD in Critical Theory in 1993, researching Contemporary Writing and Theories of the Body. After teaching at Aberystwyth University until 2014, she is now Professor in Creative Writing (Poetry) and Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of East A...
Poems
Poems of Tiffany Atkinson
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PORTRAIT OF THE HUSBAND AS FARMERS’ MARKET
The husband is a mud-on-the-boots philosophyin old jeans, loving nothing so much as slow growth.
His thoughts are distinctively British cooperatives,
jovial stall-holders subbing each other loose change.
His chest is a trestle laid with rare meats, smelling
of the smokehouse, his belly a seed-loaf, knotted
and oddly exotic. The sex of the husband’s a plump
trout, a one-off, lolling silverside-up in its shine
for a wife with the eye of a magpie. His heart,
apparently a leafy crop, is a loom of many rhizomes
reaching furlongs – who knows how far? The husband
is mineral-rich, irregular, leaving scraps of himself
all over the street for starlings to pocket. Is a crowd
of bright skins in a bushel, wheels of feral cheese,
impossible brews from the ditches. Is the season’s
measure, taking the weather however it turns out.
PORTRAIT OF THE HUSBAND AS FARMERS’ MARKET
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