in the chambers of your heart

Here's another Jo Shapcott poem - this time taken from the pictured 1992 collection:


Leonardo and the Vortex

I get like him sometimes:
seeing the same shape in everything
I look at, the same tones
in everything I hear.

But I'll never make a deluge drawing
or be gripped by the science of circular
motion. And I probably won't learn to care how
many complex collisions happen in a pool
when water is trickled from above.
How currents percuss against each other,
and how waves rebound into the air, falling
again to splash up more water in smaller
and smaller versions of the same.
How a storm is different where air and water mix,
bursting again and again through the thin skin
which separates them. How a woman's hair
moves in spouts and spirals just like water
and how the leaves of the star plant
trail on the ground in a loose coil.
And look at your sleeve, folding and swirling
around your arm, and the pattern of fine black hairs
curving from inner wrist to outer elbow,
and the underlying muscles relying on that slight
twist around the lower arm for strength,
and the blood coiling around your body
through the little eddies in the larger veins
and arteries, coiling towards the vortex
in the chambers of your heart where I sit,
where the impetus has pulled me in.

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Jo Shapcott (1953 - )

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