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

The motorway hazy, an evening in summer,
now twilit, the pause before swooping darkness;
headlamps approaching already aglimmer
but icily pale; incessant the sizzle
of tyres on the tarmac; at a touch the car radio
awakens to flavour the gaoled air with music,
saxophone, drums, piano and trumpet.

Tear-starred gaiety of prohibition ragtime
exhumes silky images of shimmying dancers,
the men in white tuxes or blazers and flannels,
the women in beaded dresses that shimmer,
shamelessly showing their silken patellas,
and I think, for the first time in years, of Aunt Clarice,
and see her in sepia, smiling in sunshine,
on the beach at Skegness, a foxtrotting ‘flapper’
who never was wed, though, whenever she visited,
she arrived each time with a different ‘uncle’-
or so it now seems - and with one called Bowen
she danced the Charleston to a portable gramophone,
both of them huge in our trembling front parlour.

As a child I could sense that she did not like me
and guessed her distaste encompassed all children.
In her smile there was something secret, unsharing,
something disturbing, beyond definition,
that carried a whiff, now recognisable
as faintly corrupt, ambiguously sexual.

Years flickered past with no meeting or letter
till I, middle-aged, was told she was ailing,
ancient, deranged, and perhaps needing succour.
I went to her home in a North London suburb
and pressed on the doorbell. The person who answered,
an elderly nurse or companion, invited me
into the hall where I saw, on the staircase,
the crazed old woman who had once been Aunt Clarice,
the dancer of Charleston, collector of ‘uncles’,
now wild and dishevelled, shrieking a litany
of loathing and fear and abusive obscenities.
Her companion thought it best I should leave.

Now twilight surrenders to night’s massive presence,
the headlamps of all the oncoming traffic
are changed from pale lenses to wild glaring goggles;
like blobs of bright acid they burn through the blackness.
I switch off the radio, but not all the music
is silenced; I still hear the silvery echoes
of trumpet and saxophone, pulse of percussion,
beneath the tyres’ sibilance and soft growl of engine,
as the beams of my own lights spear through the darkness,
which yields to my entry but closes behind me
on Clarice and Bowen dancing the Charleston
in a terrible century’s doomed adolescence.