MARIONETTE

By Dominic James

Rain sweeps the roof. Insistent

needle-point glissandos wash

the cross-beamed rafters overhead,

drip on my puppet form to wet and fill

tiny chambers, wooden drawers

of a body – thrilled to breathe,

as coursing waters steep my heart

and wasp-nests of my lungs.

Limbs ache to lift themselves.

I wonder if Pinocchio, adrift,

found life like this? Teetering

on his father’s strings the awkward,

paper innards stirred. He was alive

to more than this. Like him my eyes,

my face, fingers cut in lithe, slim hands

and pretty toes articulate a sum of parts

inanimate. My bones are dead.

No cell retains a strand of life

to edge me on the infinite.

I am a corpse of balsa boxes

fixed with glue and pin,

whose autopsy report will find –

in razor nicks on lips and chin –

the endless pains my maker’s taken.

But gaze upon these graceful lines

and leave all that aside.

No small impulse of mind suggests

a life, a woman’s grey-haired top,

another soul that reaches up

into the rain, awake to every step

and human nuance of expression.

That I, like you, appear to love.

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