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

     "O crystalline fount, if on that silvered surface
     Thou wouldst of a sudden form the eyes desired
     Which I bear outlined in my inmost parts!"

                                             St. John of the Cross


1.  How have I forsaken you, 
     My issue, in this
     Ache of the never-born?
     My muse is in tears
     In the shadow before embryo.

     Again I face the window of the page
     And watch them      as my own
     Children        kept from me
     Somehow    alive beyond words.
     ". . . and something that they are
     Stammering
     Leaves me dying."

     John of the Cross, how much in love
     With his God     can one man feel himself
     To be      before the honey of his language
     Clouds to semen     thickening
     To his beloved?

2.   I approach my floral headgear
     With a mind of its own, wielding
     The cutlery
     Of articulation.

     The writing instrument is poised:
     Razor's edge and bleeding line
     Graft the foreign flesh of Art
     Onto the eardrum, retina,
     The feather-touching fingertip.

     And from the rank and musk
     Of brown and grey majority,
     Extract for scrapbook poetry
     Only the most extraordinary plumes,
     Bits of pigmentation, hairs,         ripe
     Filaments of brilliance,
     Triggers of talon     and cuticles 
     Of shed wrapping, shawls
     Of rainbow cellophanes
     Fresh from the womb, and even turds 
     Heavy and gaudy   as the last squeeze
     Of caked paint from the spent tube.

3.  Like the cloak of occult,
     Drapes thrown open,
     Light is shed      fresh
     As paint upon those entering:
     Bosch in his Garden
     Of Earthly Delights,
     Unlatching the pane;
     Goya, the nightmares; Redon the
     Gnomes; each Disney greeting card
     Face of escape, an uglyfruit suffering
     Gravity; Francis-Bacon,
     The modern look of a man
     Whose face is rubbed raw
     Against the glass.

     Yeats saw them coupling in the foam:
     Rubbery stallions, smooth sheet muscle;
     And wrapped in the warmest belts of the spectrum,
     Bobbing in the far-off cold,
     The flesh-tone convolutions working,
     Seashells spiralling into the sudden
     Human      bitten     glistening
     Apple cores of Art.

     The delicate silouettes of Keats
     Ring the vessel holding bouquets
     Of Sensitive Plants:
     Milton's 'pansy freaked with jet',
     The slightest beauty mark at the corner
     Of the mouth      sucking dry
     The vein of mica       running through
     The stone-cold head;  and then Van Gogh
     Pumping the daffodil, sky abroil
     With sunflower pollen
                                        the delicate
     Meat of the lotus blossom
     Now in the trough          now in the crest.
     Catch it from the jerking fathoms

     Until the next push          ticking forth
     The long      slant         brow
     Of cretan flesh
     Written with the numbers that are in heaven,
     Sprinkled with symbols
     At one with the skin:
     Mythic glimpse of fish-mouth wonder
     Sprouting hairs       agape in the passage

     Eggs for eyeballs        white as the ceiling
     Of clouds          weeping the lesser
     Eggs like caviare
     Of its abundance
     Down the cheek        china conceit

     Come ye sons of art
     Out of the meadow
     Of verdure enamalled
     With flowers.