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

Under the Moon’s Reign

Twilight was a going of the gods: the air
     Hung weightlessly now — its own
Inviolable sign. From habit, we
     Were looking still for what we could not see —
The inside of the outside, for some spirit flung
     From the burning of that Götterdämmerung
And suffused in the obscurity. Scraps
     Of the bare-twigged scene were floating
Scattered across scraps of water — mirrors
     Shivered and stuck into a landscape
That drifted visibly to darkness. The pools
     Restrained the disappearing shapes, as all around
The dusk was gaining: too many images
     Beckoned from that thronging shade
None of which belonged there. And then the moon
     Drawing all into more than daylight height
Had taken the zenith, the summit branches
     Caught as by steady lightning, and each sign
Transformed, but by no more miracle than the place
     It occupied and the eye that saw it
Gathered into the momentary perfection of the scene
     Under transfigured heavens, under the moon’s reign.

Foxes’ Moon

Night over England’s interrupted pastoral,
     And moonlight on the frigid lattices
Of pylons. The shapes of dusk
     Take on an edge, refined
By a drying wind and foxes bring
     Flint hearts and sharpened senses to
This desolation of grisaille in which the dew
     Grows clearer, colder. Foxes go
In their ravenous quiet to where
     The last farm meets the first
Row from the approaching town: they nose
     The garbage of the yards, move through
The white displacement of a daily view
     Uninterrupted. Warm sleepers turn,
Catch the thin volpine bark between
     Dream on dream, then lose it
To the babbling undertow they swim. These
     Are the fox hours, cleansed
Of all the meanings we can use
     And so refuse them. Foxes glow,
Ghosts unacknowledged in the moonlight
     Of the suburb, and like ghosts they flow
Back, racing the coming red, the beams
     Of early cars, a world not theirs
Gleaming from kindled windows, asphalt, wires.

The Dream

Under that benign calm eye that sees
     Nothing of the vista of land and sky
It brings to light; under the interminably
     Branching night, of street and city,
Vein and artery, a dream
     Held down his mind that blinded him
To all except the glimmering, closed-in warmth
     Of his own present being. Alone
And yet aware within that loneliness
     Of what he shared with others — a sense
Of scope and pleasure in mere warmth —
     He seemed the measure of some constricted hope
That asked a place in which it might pursue
     Its fulness, and so grew away from him,
Swayed into palpability like a wall:
     He knew that he must follow-out its confine
To his freedom, and be taught this tense fluidity
     Always a thought beyond him. His hand
Still feeling for that flank of stone,
     The space that opened round him might have grown there
For the resurrection of a being buried
     By the reality that too much defined it: now
The transitions of the dream, the steps and streets,
     The passageways that branched beneath
Haphazard accumulations of moon on moon,
     Spurned at each turn a reality
Merely given — an inert threat
     To be met with and accommodated. The ways
He walked seemed variants on a theme
     Shaped by a need that was greed no longer,
The dream of a city under the city’s dream,
     Proportioned to the man whom sleep replenishes
To stand reading with opened eyes
     The intricacies of the imagined spaces there
Strange and familiar as the lines that map a hand.

After a Death

A little ash, a painted rose, a name.
     A moonshell that the blinding sky
Puts out with winter blue, hangs
     Fragile at the edge of visibility. That space
Drawing the eye up to its sudden frontier
     Asks for a sense to read the whole
Reverted side of things. I wanted
     That height and prospect such as music brings —
Music or memory. Neither brought me here.
     This burial place straddles a green hill,
Chimneys and steeples plot the distances
     Spread vague below: only the sky
In its upper reaches keeps
     An untarnished January colour. Verse
Fronting that blaze, that blade,
     Turns to retrace the path of its dissatisfactions,
Thought coiled on thought, and only certain that
     Whatever can make bearable or bridge
The waste of air, a poem cannot.
     The husk of moon, risking the whole of space,
Seemingly sails it, frailly launched
     To its own death and fulness. We buried
A little ash. Time so broke you down,
     Your lost eyes, dry beneath
Their matted lashes, a painted rose
     Seems both to memorialise and mock
What you became. It picks your name out
     Written on the roll beside a verse —
Obstinate words: measured against the blue,
     They cannot conjure with the dead. Words,
Bringing that space to bear, that air
     Into each syllable we speak, bringing
An earnest to us of the portion
     We must inherit, what thought of that would give
The greater share of comfort, greater fear —
     To live forever, or to cease to live?
The imageless unnaming upper blue
     Defines a world, all images
Of endeavours uncompleted. Torn levels
     Of the land drop, street by street,
Pitted and pooled, its wounds
     Cleansed by a light, dealt out
With such impartiality, you’d call it kindness,
     Blindly assuaging where assuagement goes unfelt.