Menna Elfyn



                          Nothing but Curves


(having read about the underwear industry)


1

How wonderful the courtesan clothes
of our imagination. Diaphanous, flowing, they droop
over heavy counterpanes at the foot of the bed.

Having unlaced the memory
of grandmother's corsets blushing at me
—hanging ribs, like a human abattoir—

silky girls come to mind:
sliding in on memory's watercoloured canvas
—frameless, without hook or eye to hold them,

or a flannel hairshirt to flay and squeeze them,
no underwire to uplift them
to yet-unfettered heights.

The breast is the golden globe, whispering suggestions
to ruffled organza drifts,
serenely lanolined liberty bodices.

These things are full of calm,
their frail ribbons liberate
the motherland of the self,

making country a homeland all to herself:
where a woman is free of her pressure;
her self a blank sheet between her own hands.

2

—but by fluorescent light—this is hydraulics,
refined by forensic scientists, cantilevering
their brand-new way of getting

the rounded breast into bed. This is a lode to be mined:
thirty sections origami together
to create the other, the perfect orb.

Look. And you'll see that the stars of the screen
lie when they say they have hidden secrets:
their breasts push their facelifts up to their chins

and the body politic spurs on the scuba divers
as they bounce the buoys down in the bay.
There's no future these days in swimming alone.

3

'Nothing but curves' crows the ad—
but I return, barefoot, to the dark ages
to peer at a woman who stands in half-darkness

opening a hook and eye,
placing them in a drawer where they won't be disturbed
before slipping out of her soft fleece

by the candle's eye. Climbing the mattress
she slips into her fold, closing
with a 'good night' the gap
between herself and the bottomless pit
by sleeping on her front with scripture in mind,

putting tongue and flesh safe by for a while.

The night is a sinless sarcophagus—
rasping, hard like a blind man's kiss.

                              Welsh; trans. Elin ap Hywel

Menna Elfyn, Welsh, trans. Elin ap Hywel, Blind Man's Kiss: Cusan Dyn Dall, Bloodaxe Books, 2001.