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

i
Nimium ne crede colori

In this public place:
            Pearls from Paris delicately scrolled
            above her discreet decolletage: sensuality
            and reason battle to a civil draw.
Her hair swept
            frozen in an arctic wind from which
            a diamond winks and on her finger
            another array for emphasis.
She visits sundry fantasies
            gathering them in that sequin-studded purse
            for later view as a child
            accretes roundest pebbles on the beach--
Only she, discreet aside,
            rather hangs them in the air for her spouse
            in mock despair to finger as blind
            in Braille tries to figure equations destiny.

ii

In this public place:
            Her silver shoes on parquet floors enscribe circles
            to Sinatra’s songs--faltered love and
            fog nights in the spotlight of her mind,
conceiving subterranean plot in plot
            where trysts are dreamt and she controls
            the ardent lot as if each dispensation
            were offered ... No strings attached.
Indiscretion its own reward:
            No passion,
            this trolling in the party sea
            --love and lure the same.

iii

And he?
            Absent mystery, sidelong glances toward
            the halo of lithe and long, but holds himself
            by the silken rein of a kind of self-abnegation.
Entombed, perhaps:
            Self-design in a pattern he and she agreed upon,
            long before the spell had dried like the pages
            in a book never read, set aside:
A bookend now:
            Holding coats, taking bows, drinking more or less,
            as the moment arbitrates, an albatross on the wind
            that vacantly takes another ride--or
                                                  an old man in a chair.

iv
Gradu diverso, unfa via

In this private place:
            Cotton melts, a labyrinthine of tourniquets
            discloses a shape of routed vows,
            and many promises lie on broken floors.
Somewhere deep
            a tumor vies and seeks impletion
            while she dines on cookies, crumbs flake
            on randy sheets and she reads the gothic tales.
Banished nights
            from the pages folded, ambulatory visits,
            arias of Puccini spun from strains of Iron Butterfly,
            and the doe sweeps suitors with an eye.
She slips into
            metamorphosis, a swan on midnight
            lakes on whose quiescence a castle grows,
            dust cohering in the pages of convoluted corridors.

v

In this private place
            she hears the stranger who by each step
            imparts a coming (Hyde, perhaps), but not he
            she knows or, even once, cared about.
And now
            barefoot on the wooden floor, stained with floods
            of toilet leaks, flees the premonitory sound
            from this sinistrous figure now upon the floor.
Romance novels:
            Descreet reward:
            Surrogate visits by acarpous moon
            --sighs ignored. Would the dawn delay?

vi

And he?
            Abdication, shallow dreams of broken routes,
            reconstructing from half-drawn veils;
            time regained, winning once, sine qua non.
Entombed, perhaps:
            In a pile of broken glass, abrogated cure,
            children at the door, speaking in odd tongues.
            Gamboling strangers want to know his name.
A bookend, now:
            Hearing in the dark, words to window panes,
            a broken hand that will not heal--
            The semi rolls, the tiger sighs inside
                                               the ambry of the soul.