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

All together?
We’re here. Reflections from the water
trumpet and bellow.
So many faces aboard
dissolved in cheap gin.

But no-one who recognises her:
The ferry swings windward
as thin as on some old etching.
The bell jangles
the engine pounds its darkness down there.
The throbbing plate-iron isn’t there, is.
What does one remember?

That there wasn’t any cure against life.

Kastellholm’ s point thin in the whiteness
with white leaves whipping in the whiteness.
She is convinced she sees it.

Tried always to please
on the mattress behind the bar
or with the right words
when Westman wept in her lap.
Who lives only his own life?

Isn’t there, is.

She sits perched on the railing -
each fragment of her radiates
over that blurred court, with trumpets
faded gilding, a drunken murmuring.
Wind and spray blow straight through her.

Who were you?
Don’t remember, do.

Those surfaces, no colour, no smell.
In the distance a sudden bollard
green with hesitant life. It’ll do.

Her hand clings to the railing
not to be dissolved in vertigo.

Her admirer, heavily forfeited
(his suit is only its fish-bone pattern)
waves his rarefied fist
You should’ve seen me then.
Staggers and the sweat runs down
in the place where his eye should be.

Yet she did once have a name, and the cafe
fabricated a personality.
As If someone could be fixed per se.

Nearly there: must be whitened houses
sunk into the whitened sky
with whitened voices, whitened steps.
Just what is being demanded of her?

The waiting people hurry through each other.
There are fewer and fewer eyes around her.
Soon there’s no-one to see her any more
making her real.

Nervous touches of colourless rouge
over the memory of lips. The comb
runs through vanishing hair.
The mirror has lost her face.
For God’s sake come on!
Coming, I’m coming.