Amazingly, the thing I want to write about
Is the colour of the coat you wore that winter.
I could write about so much more –
The way your clarinet sounded like your voice, for instance,
Or your voice like your clarinet,
Or the way Zola described the clarinet
As sounding like the voices of women beloved …
But it is your coat that I want to write about.
All that winter we were cold,
Cold and young and unknown,
Walking through a London which was always dark, it seemed;
And you always, always in that coat,
Which was unremarkable in cut and colour
(It was Prussian Blue, for the record)
And underneath which was always, I always knew,
The sunburst of your orgasm.
By Jonathan Steffen
Photograph by Allegra Loch
Visit the Tuesday Poem blog for more: www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.uk
Winter Coat appears in Exposure
