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

I
Is it the long dry grass that is so erotic,
waving about us with hair-fine fronds of straw,
with feathery flourishes of seed, inviting us
to cling together, fall, roll into it
blind and gasping, smothered by stalks and hair,
pollen and each other’s tongues on our hot faces?
Then imagine if the summer rain were to come,
heavy drops hissing through the warm air,
a sluice on our wet bodies, plastering us
with strands of delicious grass; a hum in our ears.

We walk a yard apart, talking
of literature and of botany.
We have known each other, remotely, for nineteen years.

II
Late in the day; but light still full in the sky
and windows open to the street give passers-by,
whether they care to look or not, a view
of bookshelves, pictures, typewriter; and these two,
one on the floor, kneeling; one in the chair;
mouth sealed to mouth, fingers in each other’s hair;
fixed, immobile, still as the furniture, still
as the daylight; which will move before they will.

III
We might as well have grown up in Tristan da Gunha
knowing only a hundred people,
so intermeshed are the channels of all our lives.

Or it’s like a maypole dance with intricate ribbons.
For you to cross my path again
is just the latest predictable intersection-

to the observers, that is: to the folks back home
wondering from a distance about us,
knowing we’re at last in the same city.

spying for spores of gossip. But not to us:
face to face we astonish each other,
shocked by the common climate we’ve evolved.

We find familiar names on each other’s tongues,
tune our accents, taste and suck at
the episode that’s ours; and grow to ease in it

IV
Not that it could ever be easy
But there was the rain, you remember, after such heat-
trapped sweat and the roof leaking-
and so, in the swollen air, blackberries ripened
Soon after the cable came we found them,
darkly glistering, luring us on and on,
“sweetest in the depths of the brambles”
you said (the gentle cliché smilingly offered.)
We picked a bagful, carried them home,
juice leaking through sensible London paper,
to eat with cream: a small distraction,
a final titbit. The evening passed, and the night.
Then trains and planes and goodbye again
as another tropical Sunday breathed in our mouths.