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

On the knife-edge between actual and potential
Mere heat of distillation may abstract
An interface where everything essential
Plunges the great dream in as great an act:
Later, that act’s a pallid image of
Its dream; but here is art, perhaps, or love.

Where egoism and self-immolation
At their extremest, border one full mood,
With almost equal warmth art scans a Station
Of the Cross or gawks at some Pandemian nude;
Yet all that awe and impulse may collate
Only the windy half-world of self-hate.

Pulses of lightning blaze, or break, eclectic.
Love, only, lets totality prevail,
When appetites grow calm, affections hectic,
To eat and beat and worship and inhale:
Till art stands purged, to grasp with full intent
The disparate violence of that one assent.

Crude images of tenderness and power
Are rafts swept down a deep but childish tide:
The phallus, or the mind, ‘thrusts up a tower’;
The ‘wounds bleed dark’ in some obsession’s side;
Hysteria may intrude its postured ‘I’,
Or calculation squeeze all affect dry.

What toil can raise its constructs equal with
The status of emotion or event,
Not standing slobbered with a mist of myth
But clear and real, ablaze with measurement?
For Sestos’ ruins what Leander braves
A blue heave of unconsummated waves?

Up through that imagery of turbulence
The thundered peak strikes grandly for the sun.
What most transcends phenomena each sense
Most firmly grasps as pure phenomenon.
Strong words, and stronger passions, stand at length
Mastered and ordered by that greater strength . . .