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

A feather...a wing...a death’s head in stone...
I was called to the Waters of Gold by sepia images,
                 But I was lost in the night.

I was mounted on a bird eating its own feathers,
Returning to the Golden Head with silver moon-hair.
The palm of your hand extends with deliberate intent,
How healing, now impoverished,
Now a union of the shared death
Called the Eclipse of the Sun.
The result: a synthesis, the enigma of the image
Occurring in a medium or through a medium;
A step beyond knowledge.
We call it the Spiral of Life,
When, as now, the heart’s afflictions weigh down
The chosen supplicant who,
As she enters the chamber, bares her breasts,
Sighs out loud, pushes back her hemispheric hair.

This takes place simultaneously in seven dimensions;
A cosmos of seven stars
Conceived as a dissolved psychic body or
Her own body seen from afar
As immanent objects melt into shadow.
As always the black Raven’s Head
Heralds transformation through putrefaction
And, as flesh displaces identity in fusion,

The saturnine Sinful Man approached.
He became the Ideal Woman
And a dead sun imploded in my mind.
A voice called across tattered clouds
As she opened her body.
I saw a skull gleaming in the ruins.

As the Ideal Woman embraced the Sinful Man,
Caressing sable feathers, feeling wing-tips,
Touching genitals,
A dark servitor placed another skull
Over the stone door: darkness obscuring darkness.
Now, Isis, reaching down from Heaven,
Dragged the severed head of Osiris from the waters
As tortured worlds spewed magma,
Engulfing the centres of understanding.

And, like a mythologem, the Earth became Hell.
So Uranos raped Gaia...the union of shared death.

I was called to the Waters of Gold by sepia images,
                 But I was lost in the night.