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

Is this the place where ideas grow that come
from the kind of dark where needs emerge;
taken up by those in basement offices,
at the end of a corridor, one floor down
in a lift where the light itself emerges
from above the mirror and when the doors
pull open you always turn to the left
over redbrown carpet so worn in places
the underfelt shows and where, you know,
years of cleaners have never hoovered
deep enough into the angle between pile
and wainscot. there is a smell of drying out
and crumbling. And past a ply and plasterboard
door, that's always scuffed and worn
around the handle, the man expecting you
is sitting. You would have liked him to be
shorter than you as he rises from his chair
to greet you, with receding hair and glasses,
but instead he's taller and slightly stooping
and has the bluest eyes you have seen
since you met the playwright's nephew.
And it's no good asking now why you
are here, because, you see, there is
a little crisis just around the corner
in Lesotho, or Belize, somewhere
in this known and shrinking world,
and it's no good saying that you were there
only to teach and that was years ago
and with the British Council because
the thought of open sky five floors
above your head and the bus ride
through the evening crowded autumn streets
won't help you breathe. As if the walking
from a smoky staffroom to another lift
had been enough to raise you for the act
of teaching. But the scuffling pupils
running to the classroom and pushing past
had just depressed you even more and now
it's all caught up with you in unexpected ways.
Perspective now is down through wormless earth,
almost to the molten core and you would like
to need to pull the collar from around your neck,
or fish your hankie out to wipe your brow
but it's not true and all the time the face
has gone on talking, far, far more
than you had had the right to hope and the print
of some small copse in somewhere English
that's behind him on the wall has faded to its frame
and silence then sets in. Suddenly a voice
that's yours begins to talk you through
the problems and you're writing for yourself
a memorandum of understanding and there's
the pulling back of chairs, the proffered hand.
The hollow office door is closing shut
behind you and the dozen little marionettes
that voice your life are clustering round you
asking for your help. Light falls from plastic
boxes where dead moths have gathered.
So you avoid the lift and take the concrete,
cold stairs up, and cross the concrete foyer
through swing doors into the autumn light.