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

The irregularity of my piano-playing sometimes means
that when I sit down in front of the keyboard
and begin to play a few bars of some piece
I may have played for years – a prelude, a minuet –
I suddenly lose my memory of it:
a great chasm of forgetfulness then opens up
and the music is silent. How is memory
to be made whole again? The sound-image seems to have disappeared.
One way of making the music return
has been to think of the room where I once learned
to play in my childhood: to concentrate –
not on the music but on the room
with its cool freshness on a summer’s day
when the sounds of the neighbourhood turn silent and the sunlight
from the room opening onto the garden is reflected, vibrates
there in the dimness of a deep green velvet,
is refracted in the chandelier’s iridescent prisms, reflected
without tinkling on the ceiling or the walls.
Behind me are the pastel painting of sailing-boats on the Sound,
the sofa purchased at the turn of the century in Helsinborg,
mirrors and silver, and I feel as well my grandmother’s presence
beside me on a chair near the keyboard
where my fingers now are running easily and without trembling
across the white keys and the black
as if I were walking on a well-known path,
a passage, corridor or staircase just now rediscovered
in my memory’s furthest recess, in its sounding labyrinth,
and she is seventeen as in that photograph,
her curly hair pinned up, the suggestion of a smile –
the year must be 1900, her lace collar is white
and she is looking at me with her large grey-blue eyes,
looking at me with love.