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

     The city is sunny today but bitterly cold. The shop windows have rediscovered tinsel and cotton-wood snow and the street salesmen, with finger-less gloves, open their battered suitcases to reveal gaudy plastic toys and packets of cheap wrapping paper. Yuletide is on the horizon. It is too early yet to hear the Salvation Army band play O Come All Ye Faithful but the big stores are already grottoed and serving turkey lunches in their cafeterias. There is a constant bird-twittering from the electronic cash registers as all the old images are pressed into commercial service.

     While I have been wandering the city with a cynical eye, my window has been transformed. The temperature has fallen steadily and now the glass is crusted on the inside with ferns of frost growing between an incredible silver leopard skin that stretches out on either side. Snow falls on snow until the kerbs disappear. The school is surrounded by a palisade of white spears. The wind, in gusts, strikes the rooftops like a powerful hand so that puffs of talcum powder show intermittently in the arcs of the street lamps.

     Secretly I wish that it would snow for days or even weeks, so that the white tide rose above the ground floor windows and people had to cut tunnels from their front doors. The soft white passageways would grow and spread until there was a gigantic subterranian network filled with muffled voices. Shoppers unwinding balls of wool to find their way home from the ice palace of the supermarket. Glistening caverns, formed by the chance meetings of many tunnelers, filled with lost choirs singing Hark the Herald. But the snow is satisfied when it has covered the bases of the lamp-posts. The wind drops. There will be no labyrinth this year.

     Everything is either black or white in this last sector of the calendar. The land is a zebra. I am wrapped in a zebra’s cold hide. Its mane is at my throat, its frozen legs dangle from my waist and its shiny black hooves clatter like icy stones at my uncertain feet. I feed off the black pips of white apples. My dreams are of marble and of charcoal. The year’s last colours pump steadily from a congealing artery and I am left with a brittle skin stretched very thinly over the cold ground. Something makes me look up the I Ching hexagram for the time of Greater Snow. It consists of five broken horizontal lines standing above a solid one. It means returning.

     With a finger I draw the shape in the very centre of the opaque window. I meditate on the fact that the Duke of Chou described six ways to return. First, to return after a slight mistake. Second, to make an admirable and proud return. Third, to return again and again. Fourth, to set out in company but to return alone. Fifth, to return in a noble and upright manner, and finally, to return in disorder.

     I recognise these returns. I have made them all, but this time I have the pleasure of deciding howl will return. Naturally I choose the fifth way. The bright, cold morning sun has shone through the symbol on the window pane and with the hexagram faintly branded on my forehead I walk in a noble and upright manner out into the cold streets.

     People hooded and gloved are finding it difficult to keep their footing. A few look into my face as I pass, they see the brand and know that I have returned, but although I step forward confidently, something in their eyes says: this one set out in company but has returned alone.