The alabaster legs of the lonely woman <br />hang from the window like white ensigns <br />out of the laughing window like false teeth <br />sheets, flagstaffs, telescopes, rolls of music, <br />or you would say beheaded necks of swans <br />or the electric horns of factories <br />where foreign dreams are nightly fabricated. <br /> <br />Yearning for her coal once heaved in the seam <br />for her the sewers shrieked their way through London <br />and pigeons ate each other in the air. <br /> <br />But the deserted lady is frozen to the marrow <br />her heart has floated into her left leg <br />and her forked tongue asks in three languages <br />for a bassoon, a pyramid, and an egg. <br /> <br />All the white birds have flown out of her lips <br />the Polar Bear has eaten her left breast <br />her eyes are covered with yellow webs of dust, <br />in fact she is what a Saint would call abandoned <br />since even her own self has forgotten her.<br /><br />Francis Scarfe<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-merry-window/
