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

I like the way that Chet rhymes glove with love,
and occasionally almost makes the notes fit,
wavering just the attractive side of flat

and going slow, slow, slow into the song.
It’s good on my walkman
here our last day lying on this Greek beach.

I can hear the waves behind it,
especially when he pauses for breath,
reaches for his trumpet

and they come scuttling in, shushing against the beat.
Then a water skier whirrs across the horizon,
a group of Italian tourists pauses at the curving balustrade

down to the beach, has a noisy conversation,
then straggles on along the cliff.
And distracted from Chet

I lie suddenly here in an English autumn,
leaves up to my ankles, cold city mornings, the turning year
turning again. I am starting lists, suspending them

across a going-grey sky.
And you and I, we are living in gaps,
departing from the meanings we didn’t quite manage,

but getting by. This is good, I tell myself,
Chet would approve. We are getting lost,
which Chet rhymes with defrost.

We are turning this black Greek night
which we scrapped and cried in
into presence and absence, some sort of together.

But now Chet is back again
with the long, breathful pauses of My Funny Valentine,
and my favourite work of art which he rhymes with heart

and all the mystery of trying to make the big
and the little things fit
seems just like the breath, the precarious breath

of Chet’s halting voice
and the way his trumpet comes
suddenly from nowhere, high exalted

then leaves a little gap for the shush of the waves
to run up the beach and down again,
up and down again.