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

Within the pure and
brilliant sarcophagus
how calm the water –
warm, marrying completely
the outlines of the body!

Free, light, the body,
naked, reposed, disposed
and in perfect peace.
All is ease in the fluid
where the lissom legs are both

as alive as arms, where
man deposits his stature,
flows full-length until
his height takes another form;
he stretches himself to reach

the extremity
of his unwinding; he feels
one with a sense of
his ability to let
himself be fully released.

Delightfully, he
transposes his fulcrums of
balance: one finger
can lift and carry himself,
and his floating energies

in the tranquil mass
of the bath half melt away
dreaming of angels
and deepsea weeds. Weight of flesh
almost imperceptible,

awash in its own
happiness; warmth of his blood
almost as warm as
the water’s intimacies,
spreading through every vein.

The living body
can barely be distinguished
from the formless one
whose substance replaces it
with its every movement.

Someone is mingling
with the infinite fullness
surrounding him;
someone feels he is gently
dissolving. The whole body

is at present no
more than a pleasant dream
vaguely dreamt by thought.
The sweet moment mirrored with
limbs limpid in water’s glass.

He observant of
and converser with himself
marvelling at all
the grandeur, the symmetry
of members he subjugates,

and the thinking head
is entertained by some foot
or other that comes
to the surface far away,
obeys as if by magic.

It beholds a toe
floating up, flexing itself,
a knee emerging
and sinking back into this
transparency, an island

extruded by waves
of some oceanic swell,
then by some caprice
plunged back again, down to
the very depths of the deep.

It is will itself
and the being’s general
liberation that
find themselves recomposed in
the repose of the billow.

There lingers perhaps
in the close and steamy air
a scent whose flower is
complexity still
questioning the memory,

caresses, colours
naked being’s vague desires.
Eyes lost, closing.
Contact with time dies away.
The mind opens veins of a dream.