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

amid the rain of ether from the noisy sky
& the mild diffidence of dials, the drench of laws
and scripts greeting the storm, its policy of tempered
the exasperation of metals & drift as if its bloom were simple

to the corpus from below in panels, with outliers brushed into ice
the fruiting instability of air, beneath which a ribbon struggles
I am a conversation articulated quietly across oceans
regarded as a measure of uncertainty or surprise

surviving precisely as a desire for redundancy
& this morning the first the guides that lead you in
their capture/the displayed tautology the tunnels of air
preferments of fall lines, new climates tightening on the earth

waypoints for the astronaut & the arctic tern
fat crickets & car-wrecks in fine evening rain
in spilt declivities of bright symbology
tacticians drive their windward aires along

demonstrating the facilitation of flight
the slew at sea, the captured wires & the unequal catapult
definitions too lazied to mark the precision of the first breath on deck
stepping into a rose

but you were walking towards me, after all, as if
it weren’t in fact anything other than the imaginary
front sight of one index pressed to your brow
which held you to a name and its willing execution

the pure distinctions you pull upon
your eyes the specific lightness of material perfection
a static click breaking into small worlds
where death has music in a vice-like

I think not. A cloud of polarised light
the specific charade I cleave to ‘miracles of ’ falling to machinery
one black dot spilling fowards into the brim of a pupil more distant
his schematics of rash energy, clean daguerreotypes of humidity

& humour beats down in planes and sepals from the island trees
and you say I’ve dreamt this & your voice is exceeding level
as your eyes with their perpetual ironies inquired
practically as the parable of the aviator’s eye

of a shelf of clines and deteriorating greys
frayed with the packed flocks of boreal falls
nighthawks & assemblages of frosted passerines with foil legs
described as angels as the waves reflect

at ten centimeters from their mute bodies and return.
and, in the perfect meteorology of the brittle desert,
at the limit of breathable air where it thins into darkness,
these are the scripts of fallen planes, broken by fog.

& you were scraping the ice from the leading edge a.m.
printing an image of the mansions of the dead a.m.
looking for a small world in the uninhabitable air
trying to extinguish some deeper desire for fire

with something as cold and as hard and as temporary as flight
& what you were hoping was that the air would recolonise you
recognise you and welcome you into the sunlight
and all would be forgiven. ink in the thick air would curl

into glyphs of desire & the lightly starred heel
would dip into the sea at dawn as it spills
into a blaze of mute objects
in the pure suburban heavens