Skin Poetry
Skin is Time and Lets Itself be Flayed
By Iain Bamforth
He saw, or thought he saw,
his skin become time’s curvature …
Having peeled it off, he holds it
up for further inspection
in this troubled classical landscape:
Apollo’s deep bare garden.
and his a skin of tenderness,
a hammock of social obligation
and naked reconciling
in the city of the covenant
(impersonal
love of the human
at the service of his art),
not the see-through foolscap
of a world made flat,
one surface that everywhere folds
into the trite hosannas
of Eros’s other job—
unprofitable bookkeeping …