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

i. The Hall

Where the world is introduced
as a play of light which scans
an abstract strategy from which
the house derives its plans.

Here a door admits the presence
of undistinguished air
to a set of rooms established as
a various elsewhere.

ii. The Sitting Room

Where the best intentions
are displaced and settled
in the fittings and decor.
Fire and an easy chair,
 
paintings, rows of books,
cultivate an earnestness
confounded by the overlooked
omission of a door.

iii. The Library

The accumulated wisdom of
someone’s ancient family line
and the contents of two bookshops,
antiquarian, since closed down.

Books by the yard, leather bound
suggesting intellect and wit
except around doors and windows
where they’ve been trimmed to fit.
 

iv. The Study

Where business is done on deckle
embossed with the name of the house.
Where bills and accounts are juggled
to fix a balance of profit and loss.

Where excess is indicated by
the respect the room commands:
the chesterfield, the mahogany desk,
and a wealth of final demands.

v. The Breakfast Room

From which an aspect over lawns
and a carefully managed view
or parterres and a lily pond
replete with morning dew

detract from the vision incarnate
that packs into a fleshy yawn
wrinkles, bald spot, bloodshot eyes
and gaping dressing gown.

vi. The Dining Room

A conversation piece
where selected features like
a bàs relief or urn inspire
and accommodate high talk.

Where appreciated mouthfuls
are served, then come and go
to tasteful strains of Elgar,
Aristotle, Joan Miró.

vii. The Kitchen

Dreams of concealment,
of explaining clean away
such functionary details
as the everyday.

Provisions must be made for
polished surfaces and glass.
Amongst the labelled storage jars
ferments a kind of chaos.

viii. The Pantry

Ought to be lined with alabaster
and white marble tiles, or some
imperishable material to withstand
calamity or what-may-come.

Its illustrative foresight
should be a quiet rebuke
to the instinctive, as in the eponymous
painting by Pieter de Hooch.

ix. The Conservatory

Where future daughters of the house
will languish and endure
the promise of orchids:
cultivated, but impure.

The glass obscured by rubber plants,
the heat at any hour
supply ideal conditions
to graft, or to deflower.

x. The Master Bedroom

Where architecture can’t conceive
of territories staked out
and subsequently bargained
in some secondary plot.

Where plans don’t always focus
on an ideal physical form
and the consummation of desire
is not, perhaps, a room.

xi. The Bathroom

Alludes to the natural world
as a sylvan spree
of tiled peacocks, willows
and classical statuary

elevating baser moments
and positioned to dismiss
the theory of mortality,
the deathly hit and miss.

xii. The Second Bedroom

Built with the stuff of dreams
and required to withstand
ghosts, hobgoblins and (hardest of all)
the Invisible Man.

Childs’ play. Brick upon brick:
all come tumbling down,
but safe as houses later
with darkness strewn around.

xiii. The Guest Bedroom

Packed under the overhead tank
but not lavish with its space,
adequate, but not designed
to encourage lengthy stays.

Exhibits an ostensible taste,
soft towels and subtlety.
On the bedside table,
a guide to Local B&B.

xiv. The Attic

Between tea-chests and boxes,
a strange assemblage lurks
of portraits and mad relatives
and gadgets that don’t work.

As nature abhors a vacuum,
it follows that beneath
the roof, suppressed desire
should accumulate, as heat.