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

When I cannot stand
to muster strength against misfortune
when I cannot sleep
and face an entire tank of dirty laundry
when I
mistake my children
for dinosaurs
but take the favorable disposition of luminaries in the sky
for a simple act of courtesy
when at a quarter to
eight I have to go
and at a quarter to nine I have to go
and at a quarter to eleven I
have to go
and the radio
is saying all manner of bad things
when the telephone finally tunes out
because it can’t take this any more
and a piece of butter brought to mind
does not spread on an imaginary piece of bread
and what’s more I stumble in the dark of night on
the bicycle in the hall

the sleepy and slightly irritated striking of a match is heard
and smoke reaches under the door
This is you
starting to talk on and on to me about another woman

   Another woman in your place
   Another woman in your position
   Another woman at our level of civilization would pay no attention
     to these regular monthly whims would not pay attention
     would not pay

My forehead tenses up with the effort to imagine the seductive
adaptability of a n o t h e r woman to o u r level of civilization and
when finally I succeed I smile the trustingly disdainful smile of the
Cheshire cat or of Julio Cortazar gladly giving up my place at the stove to the other woman and in sleep and in all of my horizontal-verticaltrigonometrical knee-eared cold-nosed spiral-eyed positions and while she masters them paying me no attention whatsoever I steal up to the front door feeling for my shoes and thinking only about how not to get snagged by the bicycle in the hall

The doorbell rings
I open the door
Another woman with a plaintive voice jumping out of her dress asks me to call the police her husband got drunk and she hit him with a skillet full of cutlets you wouldn’t have any valerian would you thank you what is this disgusting stuff I’ve never taken anything like it good God some people have proper lives, quiet and calm and happy

Coming back into the room for a handkerchief I notice that another woman resiliently-weightily has collapsed onto something brown-red and dirty-blue She has a splendid golden almost masculine torso cut off by a frame and blind eyes smeared over in black It seems in my position she is pretty satisfied although Modigliani does not like being looked at

The television flickers
Another woman on the screen
whispers and wails into an invisible microphone
fatally shuts her eyes revelling in her
shrewish gait and animal longing
for another man
For you probably

In half an hour another woman in a crooked veil
and work boots
suddenly falls off the book shelf onto my head
and lies on the floor all open in a swoon
at that page where the enemy has just burned down a Russian village
where Catholics ceaselessly butcher Huguenots
and Turks do it to Armenians
and the bronze horseman wears down the bronze steed
riding from Petersburg to Moscow
trying to get there for the morning execution of the Streltsy

Bunchberry sauce for meat and chicken
is something we never have
Bunchberries do not grow at our market
probably another woman is in the kitchen looking through
the cookbook she turned to me with her
tasty bunchberry butt pasted on a cardboard
wrapper of German-made stockings

Blue twilight is soaked
and its contours are lost in the little river and for hours and minutes the suffering cello squeak of the doors
winds around the digital lock in the entryway

In the yard wheezing children work hard to carve from snow
another woman
Her head keeps falling apart
it’s like some sort of punishment to make this stupid head
who ever thought it up
you could just cut the eyes in her stomach

Growing dark      Starting to drizzle      Growing light
   Stretching out
Peering through      It started to freeze

Another woman in my place looks in the mirror
turning her face so that
the circles under her eyes aren’t seen

Another woman in my position sorts through the spoons
and climbs up to the top shelf to get washing powder

Another woman at our level of civilization
walks along the sidewalk in dirty tattered jeans
looks through magazines at the kiosks
gets bored talking with friends
figures out the story’s ending after the third
paragraph although it only has two

and she comes out of the metro
walking toward the Pushkin monument at that very moment
when the poet with his stiff stone face
takes off his top hat
and turns toward Tver Boulevard
listening wearily to the noise of airplanes
to the light clatter of carriage wheels
and to the squeak of floorboards in Mikhailovskoe
He is watching with feigned indifference

another woman
who pays him absolutely no attention
as she melodically moves across the street
Her face turns pink in the shining warning light
of the traffic signal   Brakes squeal
She shrieks and runs
without looking back choking on the frozen air
mechanically reading signs and being reflected in
every face until finally she falls
flat in the dark of night
accidentally tripping on a bicycle
in the hall