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

Only there, in the gateway,
did we touch. My arm, hesitant,
lifted like a heavy weight
to her shoulder. Hers to my waist.
So, simply, things altered.
We paid and went in, to see the Pictish stones.

Twenty years later I was there again,
allegedly to look at Pictish stones.

I hardly saw them the first time,
watching her sketch the carving,
listening to her gladness
at finding them. My eye moved
between stone and drawing, memorised the line of her wrist.
She drew a camel and a seahorse.

I expected little, going back there,
except some odd-shaped Celtic curiosities.

In a village shop we were taken
for honeymooners. To her huge amusement.
The taste of her mouth, laughing, was
honey and cigarettes.
Her sudden tears were brushed away
with something I didn’t catch, about transience.

The carvings are eighth century, at latest,
Celtic crosses bolted to the heart of the stone.

Those weeks were woman-scent and man-scent,
incense, and wine tasting of quinces,
and having to know about John Donne
as well as differentials,
a woman’s moods
as well as molecular orbitals.

The wind at the gateway was as chill
as I remembered. Smelling of rain on the hills.

On the reverse of the main cross
were the camel and the seahorse,
a salmon and a bull.
And many forms that never grew and flourished
except in yearning - part-horse, part-fish,
part-otter, part-cat with long abrasive claws.

I expected to lose her, and did,
to someone older, and less anxious.

What I never expected was to be so moved
after so long, by the shapes that had moved her,
by fantasy side by side with authenticity.
Or to be so grateful for John Donne,
and the seahorse,
and the wind off the hills.