Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

    1

What reasons lie behind this later
terrace encounter at the house of mists?
There’s not a more fabulous sea
than the one we glimpse in this spread
of sky. Blue marble
burnished by light.
Words intersect like insects.
Matter with no more meaning
than music has
swaying in the air. On
terrace days there’s no
evocation. Like a boat
that has forgotten – no,
that forgets its course
and doesn’t deny it. Friendship
which emerges from the silence
free from promises and desire.
The soft breeze ceases and from the dream emerge
everyday acts, feelings of guilt,
the future’s crosses, the precipice’s
stairway; life
in the bilges begins,
the mist dissolves, time
and words hurt. We say:
if Luis hadn’t died
the evening wouldn’t be so empty.
What evening? The one that now returns
to the heart, the vertigo
of death throes, the lost
and the forgotten. And what, being
here, is already lost.
When will the consistency
of this house in the mists
of the sky desist? A house
distant now, like the nostalgia
of seagulls in the wake
which melts away in the waer.
We say or it says: Lucía
(where was Lucía the evening
we spoke her name?) If only we could
put words in jewel cases,
paint them, write them down,
give them a single possible
meaning. He said to Lucía:
I still don’t understand you:
She said: if I spoke as I then did
and you recalled my words
you wouldn’t need to understand.
It’s night-time. The house
has ceased to exist. We evoke it
to retrieve it. Memory
produces only mirages. And adds:
mirages of life: fear
of death. Like summer’s
stubborn death
in Altea’s skies
on this last evening of light.
Not light but what light
denies mist: the pubic hair
of beggarwomen on the shore
and girls in the mirror.
Not the pencil which draws
the inside of amphoras
(honey, myrrh, the water
of the oasis, hips, jewels)
but the drawing which gives shape
to things and denies them.
I summon summer
embers: sick
hearts which seek
in exile, not a new life,
but the negation of lived life.
Without trees there’s no
tree shade on the trail
of houses which, in August,
rise up like a palace
of a chimera. Without a body
(your body: there, I say it)
desire is like love,
like nostalgia,
like the big windows
of the abandoned houses
we observe at sea.
Like the sirens’ gifts.
Lucía will not come back, she was never here
anyway: we shan’t summon her,
we need her.
The heart lives in the mist
like a spider in the web
of the never trodden woods.
To return is not to go back
to the days that have gone
but to the space that is
and does not abandon us,
that gives itself up only
to him who surrenders himself.
Like mirrors in the lit up
drawing room
of the unlit house.

     2

There’s no itinerary. We’re at the centre
of memory. Motionless. Light
vibrates. It illuminates recollections.
It travels across them. Islands. Clouds
like sailing ships. Shadows
in the mirror. Maritime flora.
Ulysses’ journey
begins when he regains
the images he’d given up.
He hears the sirens’ silence
and we hear his words:
the inventions of a blind man
navigating in a well of light
as I now navigate
the dense light of the house
of mists in Altea’s firmament.

I speak only of forms
and spaces. Of light
and its absence. Of what revolves
around the grey
and brightens or darkens it.
The sea, therefore, the tall
house in the mist of the sky,
the sky itself
now deserted. And the scorching
wind which burns
the images. Also
love
     and its ashes.

I’m walking through fields
of loquats and oranges
looking for I don’t know which
words. My eyes
skim the orchard.
In the background, as in pictures
painted some time ago,
houses and palm trees
between sky and sea.
A distant life which here
is motionless silence.
I go into the wood
of light in search
of I don’t know what dreams.
A gale of mist
sinks me in oblivion.
There’s no possible
going back. I succumb
to this day of images.

Among the sea dunes
the lighthouse women
are posed in the calcinated
light. Their breasts
are like silky flint,
like cactus flowers
their sex.
They murmur words we don’t understand, threads
which are tangled
in the air, pubis
in the snarl of light.
When the day’s turned off
and the sea’s a sheet
of ash,
delicate voices
swaying in the wind
reach the terrace:
maritime mirages
which lacerate us like the echo
of memories
in the dunes of the heart.