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

for R.
25.6.50

I could never find it again.
My diary says
we left our bicycles by the gate
then walked between the barley and the hedgerow
till we came to the place beneath an oak.
You’d brought enchantment
yet the day
watched youth with magic,
lent our longing
hues of a further unencountered world.

Three decades intervene.
It proved the last time that we lay
in one another’s arms.
I search the book of spells in vain.
The skies have changed.
Indifferent seasons sweep the earth. I’ve seen
the light of sorcery sinking from the fields,
although your face -
its beauty as I kissed it -
stays unforgotten.
I can still smell the fragrance in your hair.

Where the place was
the diary doesn’t say - there’s just this phrase
a lane near Upton” -
but bright corn rustled in a summer breeze,
slow June clouds never hid the sun,
the strip of turf was smooth, heavy foliage
dappled your bare skin with shadow.
No bird sang and no insect whirred. Once,
a goldfinch passed. All this,
the detailed sweetness, I recall.
Before or after hours lie in shreds.

The map we used is lost. Memory begins
at the five-barred gate of grey wood,
at dark nettles and sprays of cow-parsley,
at the back wheels ticking
as we laid our bicycles on their side -
that sharp foretaste of joy
and the secrecy lighting your eyes.

One last caress,
our return along empty roads,
late afternoon,
the ditches thick with grass -
the nowhere, there’s a blank
where sunset should have been,
midsummer harvested and gone,
each signpost wiped out with a rag,
our parting -
for there must have been one,
lips with their imprint of pleasure
smiling, making plans -
a nothingness.
There’s no path back to paradise.
The way that led there has no starting-point.

June 25th, 1980.