Model in Love, by Claire Booker

Walking Woman, by Alberto Giacometti (Switzerland) 1936.

Model in Love
 
Later there will be postcards –
prints of body parts signed in her own
meticulous italic, telling
how she misses
the warm moulding of his hands,
that splash of water
when she was only possibility. 
 
For this, she is grateful
and though she might have hoped
for arms
(or even a head)
she is glad of those pubescent breasts
with their dab of nipple,
the smooth sweep down to staccato
buttocks.                 
 
There will be time enough to tell him
that she has let herself go.
From her billowing window she dreams
of a cluttered atelier:
turps, clay, clatter of wire-cutters,
plaster of Paris; misses
how he came again and again
simply to touch
the intelligent slope of her shoulder.
 
Other arms have circled her since.
Though lovers pluck her
as they might a courgette flower
(for taste and decoration)
still she knows that a girl must be free
to walk as she will –
that a pedestal impedes, 
no matter how tenderly it kisses
the stems of her feet.

Claire Booker

This poem was previously published in Magma.

Claire Booker lives ten minutes walk from the sea in Brighton (UK) with her husband and two cats. Her work has been published widely in the UK, including in Ambit, Poetry News, The Rialto, The Spectator and Stand. She blogs at www.bookerplays.co.uk