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

For all the rain,
the ground gives nothing.

Tines ring and throw up the shock,
hauling me off my determination,
pegging me to my age.

All round is the colour
of giving up.
Only a staggered fence
tells that sky and soil
are not met in a rising pass of grey.

The kitchen is mother warmth,
a place where lost angles
and abandoned webs are tended.
So--

but then a preposterous rift
above my head; a needle of sun
on the black fork I let fall

                            and my brother,
missing for years, hurdling the gate,
dressed for a day’s walk
in waterless places.

I slip amazement
under plates and cups.
The kettle agitates,
writes the words I can’t find
in the smoke of a moment.

He tosses a sunhat
brim down on a pile of bills.

Tell me, then. He does,
his smile facing south,
fingers closed on a scruff of tan.

I hear how he danced the length
of a ship becalmed on the dateline,
tripping it between tomorrow and yesterday;

he stood an hour amidships,
legs wide, feeling the tug of the future
at his western thigh,

then scuttled east
as if to rubbish the trail
that ran between him and his dotage:

“When I reached the stern
I could see my babyhood
like a spit of land.”

On a Delhi rooftop
he threw an armful of fruit
across the well of revved engines

and salutations, to pop-eyed boys
who clung like nests
on the far cowls.

They sent back the rind--
orange and red, falling
into all that excavated life
like magma petals.

Loafing in the middle
of the largest plain in the world,
he watched an old transcontinental
bellyache up the line--

how the watertank
swung its ribbed trunk up the engine:
two monsters pleasuring
in a place without horizon.

A brief love, Hobart,
given him a week, taken again
with a shirt whose stitches were bursting
and a credit card
for a bankrupt quango:

“Chancers all about the globe,
sudden and fast as sweat.”

And chatelaines and comfort limbs
wreathed and velvet as his hatband.

An inshore skipper at Arhus
whose drunken hands had to be taped
to the wheel, who insisted that Wrexham
would one day rule Eurosoccer.

At last, Groust Point, Oregon,
where an old geezer, stuck fast
between a charity grave and hope
of another sun,
begged change for a Howard Johnson’s,

pawed my brother’s heart
as if it were a dollar he might triple
or proffer in a shit’n’shave:

“I gave him ten. It killed him.”

The man’s last breath hangs
in the kitchen. Then my brother is off,
clearing the gate again,
sweeping back a hatful of wind:
all I can expect of calls or forward
                                              addresses.

And I stand and see
the fork and the soil, the fence,
the sky--till dark lays them down
and starts for me, sucking time
from my wrist.

And in the black without time
I see harbours, burning and drawn in ice,
a path tickling lushness,
hill climbs on ghost islands--

my brother’s waving hat,
a pennant cruising, claiming;
me walking behind,
fighting down its crazed shadows.