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

1.
In deliberate cemeteries,
cats peacefully pull
    on their glinting
    whiskers.
It could be Père Lachaise,
grand and sad
    or some little Dorset
    hamlet;
    Tollard Royal, perhaps -
The charms of death
are equal; winsome
    as fresh butterflies,
they sit, look, along-
side the cats.
Void of, it’s Bob Dylan’s
phrase,
    void of form,
    they finger the butter-
cups, the buttercups,
or they endlessly
    and without im-
    patience
listen to the fine
rustling of the beech-
leaves ...
                and that’s it,
                more or less.

2.
The cats, one, two,
count them, three …
    whiskers like,
    like spiderwebs
    and eyes like tiny
furious tangerines ...
    the cats suddenly
    are gone.

Summer goes too, in a
while, then autumn follows it,
                            all reckless leaves.
Soon, who’s to doubt,
    there is snow.
Sun briefly flaring without
heat, and then snow.
    See them, you can,
    can’t you? the dwarf couple,
    hand-in-hand,
swathed with their affection and
marvel in one another.
    Envy them, it’s okay
    to do that.

They have on
good brown scarves
    that blow loosely,
    as if snatching for
a snowflake.
    The dwarves stroll
    by the rush-bladed
    rim of the village
    pond,
                  unspeaking.
They are comfortably
golden, and you bite, bite
    at the terror
    that jumps like
    an angry child
in your head.

Deliberate cemeteries.
All of them
    display a broad
    grey smile,
inescapable as home-
work was,
    remember.

3.
You wouldn’t want
to read the other
poet’s poems,
    of course not.
Were it even
Kleinzahler,
you’d not.

You have your own
for company.
Those as yet unwritten.
    Because of them,
    a bee-like quickness
shouts in the heart,
    between bursts
    of that other
    thing,
that will celebrate
nothing
    but embarrassing
    sourness
and melancholy the size
of a pumpkin.

They allow you, to-
morrow's poems,
to steal a sort of
    tingling pleasure
    in being here,

wherever here is;
you tell me.

Père Lachaise? no?
Then that black-
marbled Belgian acre
    that would give
    God, even,
    fitful dreams.
Draughty faces
in yellowing photo-
graphs, grimly gazing out
    between pewter cups
    carrying cruel blooms
    in blood-red plastic.
Hah.

All of us are stretched
uncompromisingly out
against that frozen
ground I cannot
point to,
    for it is every-
    where.

Deliberate cemeteries?
We empty them
out of our pockets
at the end of every
day,
    like change.

You’re off?
Well, then, goodbye.
Adios.
    Go on. Hurry to where
    you can never get.