Poem
Tiffany Atkinson
MARZIPAN BLUES
MARZIPAN BLUES
MARZIPAN BLUES
Later he tries to explainthe turquoise joy, at ten,
of that first Rangers strip;
his birthday-fingers skidding
on the wrapping’s brittle ice.
It’s occult, such a shock
of cloth – the sweet, sheer blue
enough to make his teeth ache.
Hard to bear the perfect interval
of white trim at the neck: the brisk
heroic V whose yearning geometry
fits just so. It’s a humbling ratio,
along the lines of football: stadium;
wee boy: the goals of men. But he’s
already elsewhere. And of course
he thinks I wouldn’t understand:
I’m pointing like a school-marm
everywhere but at myself. Look –
was the blue like this? I say. Or
this? Well, was it? Anything like this?
© 2008, MARZIPAN BLUES
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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MARZIPAN BLUES
Later he tries to explainthe turquoise joy, at ten,
of that first Rangers strip;
his birthday-fingers skidding
on the wrapping’s brittle ice.
It’s occult, such a shock
of cloth – the sweet, sheer blue
enough to make his teeth ache.
Hard to bear the perfect interval
of white trim at the neck: the brisk
heroic V whose yearning geometry
fits just so. It’s a humbling ratio,
along the lines of football: stadium;
wee boy: the goals of men. But he’s
already elsewhere. And of course
he thinks I wouldn’t understand:
I’m pointing like a school-marm
everywhere but at myself. Look –
was the blue like this? I say. Or
this? Well, was it? Anything like this?
MARZIPAN BLUES
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