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

When, sometime in the early sixties,
we tried to reformulate the idea of the Sound,
Paul Eluard’s poem ‘Bathing woman
from light to darkness’ was our only axiom:
with just this poem for our intellectual baggage
we took the boat to Hven
one May morning in a western wind
with “Eluard clouds” sweeping across the entire sky –
in joint formation as far as you could see!
When we started it was early.
The day was a circle drawn with a pair of compasses.
We walked along the long beach of the island widdershins:
saw how the maritime light would change
for every hour in the periphery:
this was “the order of splendour, the order of stones”,
mentioned in our poem.
And we could hear a drawing-pencil being used –
or was it the sea that made this whispering sound?
Imperceptibly we went to meet the sun.
In our thoughts the idea of the Sound
– two beaches, streaming salt water –
appeared as a dazzling abstraction
of lines, angles, infinity.
We felt the salt on our skin, the sand in our eyes . . .
For a long time the sunlight cut its prisms.
But when, late in the afternoon,
we finally reached the point in the poem
which lies about a kilometre south of Bäckviken
the sun was sinking, the sandy cliffs
already casting long shadows towards the east
across the green depths where we had arrived in the morning.
The stone blocks which we were sitting on
were still warm from the sun,
all we heard was the roar of the sea,
the corrosive wind had exhausted all our senses . . .
Here the island was suddenly left to the waves:
no houses could be seen,
the bay before us seemed to have gone out –
and as in ancient times it would once more have been possible
to go to sleep in the sea.