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

i.
The water has slept
the winter
has broken the woman
has hallucinations
of sound.

I want
to be on the other
side of
the window waiting
for your hands
to drag me
under the hardened
film of silence.

On the surface
they can only sense
the echoes of my will.

ii.
camped in whalebone
lamplight fingers

the intimate matrix
of your fear

iii.
swallowing        the ground rules        it's a
hard story Dora        but its true        to let
blue abase        your mouth
I say              direct the drowning
and let        the footstep man
sprain            high-strung heels
in cinematic               complicity
she did not        choose the sea
the mother                   and silence we have
all spoken in            finger-falls
and falling            in love with schizophrenia
will not        dispel these shadows
in the/rapist's eye        I
am in          complete the hole
in his dreaming                 and she is
the key to unsaid          hunger
said again        upon surfacing
there is no out               of the family
romance.

iv.
Alone in the physiology of love
that reads like violence.

v.
When I left I did not
know my destination
was the body - did not know
I would be love-locked -

a land of water there is
no leaving.

vi.
you hear an exhalation
outside the frame

but in law no one
can hear you scream

during the ellipsis
you realize your heart

is an apparatus
cut to the space

of your grandmother's garden
where you have been playing

scales of your body
in a room

this house
never knew.

vii.
playing Aphonia

button HOLE             key HOLE
OFF WITH HER

celluloid wings

viii.
the pressing architecture of your dress
a taffeta costume of time-consumed

has implications for your body
& the assembly of dream

extricating the silk under consciousness
& the moisture of historical romance

the interlacings of the outbreath
with the erotic bone

taking desire out of your clothes
is an exquisite pathology

ix.
I am close to your voice now. I am almost on your shoulder.
Here I am at your throat watching it fold
and smoothing its spoken chores.

I have not believed in your fragility.
Your chorded neck has not been tender to me.

I am almost sick of fingering
this slight kind of millinery silence
waiting for a single thread to tense and represent.

Vibrations happen here
and also correspondences, though all it feels like
is a thumbprint answered from inside.

Shall we take tea considering
the many feline lives of china and how the night
has shaped your mouth to inconsequence?

My index lifts with interpretive gentleness.
All I’ve wanted was this consultation.

Or have I mistaken your poise for surrender?
Such arresting despondence deserves applause.

How clinical after all it is to touch you in the midst
of threnody. There are many questions
at the threshold of your distress.

x.
the level of
the night like water
is raised with
the entrance of your body

our eyes follow
slowly to the
edges of our
selves

and our hands
make the sounds
of drowning.

xi
you come to a country in miniature
which buys its wives behind glass

xii.
When he comes
home I will have
nothing to give

but the coldest notes
of music.
A desperate settling
has left us

both still
alone
in the clearing.