He is a master contortionist:
he knows how to slide eyes half way down a cheek
split faces in two.
But still it startles him
when the reflection in the café window,
his own – the short but robust male women fall for –
hesitates, then remains standing when he sits down,
watching him like a stubborn lover
who refuses to be dismissed.
He turns his back, soaks up
the sunlight from the Boulevard St Germain,
tries not to glance round
and see the self in the glass still hanging there
like a detached retina.
Even when he saunters away
he remains confused,
drunk beyond anything he’s consumed,
confounded which of them
is real and which the absence.
And for a while that day,
he too – the great master of division –
is caught in the same space his models occupy
somewhere between canvas and sky.
© Rosie Jackson, first published in The Light Box, Cultured Llama, 2016.
Picture No. 10242167, © Mary Evans/brandstaetter images
Rosie Jackson has won many awards for her poetry, including first prize in the Stanley Spencer Poetry competition 2017, first prize at Wells 2018, and second prize at Torbay 2018. Her pamphlet What the Ground Holds (Poetry Salzburg, 2014) was followed by her collection The Light Box (Cultured Llama, 2016) and her memoir The Glass Mother (Unthank, 2016). Rosie has taught at the University of East Anglia, UWE, Nottingham Trent, and runs writing courses in Frome, Somerset and Cortijo Romero, Spain. Her poetry has been published in Acumen, Ambit, Frogmore Papers, High Window, Scintilla, Tears in the Fence, other journals and anthologies, set for GCSE, and used for a sculpture by Andrew Whittle in the grounds of a Dorchester hospital. In 2017 she was a Hawthornden fellow. A collection of poems about Stanley Spencer and his first wife Hilda Carline, Two Girls and a Beehive, written with Graham Burchell, will be published by Two Rivers Press in April 2020: ‘An impressive and original collection, varied yet unified.’ (Anthony Thwaite). www.rosiejackson.org.uk
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