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

I
A helicopter like a half-opened eye;
the wind's tail feather; the way
an image browns on the retina.

This picture of him I still keep secret;
a laughter, westerly, that carries with it
the world's dark half-circle

and yet carries it unawares, the way
a gull sees, or storm petrel, each landing strip
held in the eye's dull flicker.

II
I see him alighting sometimes, and always southwards,
called in to some place of near impossibilities,
where stars are unfamiliar and opposite,

where blind seas thicken into slush; or standing,
at rest amid tussock grass, the tumbledown
of whalers' graves, the propeller's flared compass;

and under the camouflage helmet's edge,
the selfsame look, the traveller's still film,
the laconic sixth sense of the winter visitor.

III
But mostly I picture him in this place,
birdlike, two weeks' home leave from his unit
and the kind of cold spell that siphons in

like diesel, leaving an unfamiliarity
of ice, a bruise made out of salt and headlights.
Here, there are windows half-open to let in

the sleet and also his own dark image
sifting from foot to foot, his smile's
misalignment hinting at the sea's distance.

IV
This much I keep safe, if little else -
the night's shiftlessness; the hall looking out
on the bus station; the first sparring classes;

block, counter-strike and kick; the methods
of breathing; both of us strangers to this kind
of martial art; the sense too

of something careless in him, almost tidal,
the way his eyes appear lazily downcast, dulsed
obliviously in and out of reach.

V
Sometimes in warm-ups I pass within a T-shirt's
breath of him, imagining a whittled thinness
almost but not quite close enough to touch.

His skin, this close, holds the wind's pattern
on sandstone or brown lichen,
the delicate grained shuck of wave

on shale as whatever low thing he speaks
to me develops into something else, a scent,
a felt calligraphy of sweat.

VI
This near intimacy creates its own space, a stillness
poised between his presence and my own anticipation,
given shape by the jib of breath between us.

There is a feeling here too slight for sharing,
the way air scents itself before rain, or perspiration;
a momentary change in pressures. There are

no words for it; only an uncertainty,
an impression of myself skirting inlets, snowfields, radar
stations, closing in to land but never quite alighting.

VII
Even as I look, something in him is turning,
shuffling loose, in touch with its own
southernness. When he tells me of his next posting,

whatever has taken shape between us gutters out
like peat smoke, sleeves itself in its own
emptiness. This, then, is all I am left with -

the dank sea-grass of his fringe, his eyes
like oil fires, lit portholes in which
the outside is deliberately occluded.

VIII
In the end, what he takes with him
is his own glimpse, darkly secreted,
paused forever at the edge of something;

the night's descent, perhaps;
the marker lights, stars like frost,
the sea's dull phosphorous; the sense

also of looking down, of watching
himself cross repeatedly into a dream
of slow-turning blades, of unbroken circles.