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

A is digitised ink, arrival’s initial:
inhabited stones, skiffing
mud in flat-bottomed boats,
of schist and marl and silt,
grain for Le Mont St Michel.

A boy with wings in old Aubert’s dream
began this storied place,
with an ‘A’ for abbey, tied to a rock,
pinned down with archivolt bands.

B is for boy, boy
who tolls in my mind
like that cloche de brume,
belling us, pilgrims through fog,
unsure of each other,
half brother, half lover.

Here are the clichés that show us
in monks meditatio
gabbling a guidebook aloud:
in this one the sun has picked out
a tattoo on his biceps,

manuscript flesh that unscrolls
like a miniature map of the Mount;
it swells and unfolds
emblazoned escarpments,
veined towers of blue and gold stone.

My fingers trace out mussel
shells –or sun-changed
lilies of France inked up
in a cloistered grey–
follows the liminal skein
of terrace and trelliswork,
touching up memory,
margins of skin.

We float on the film,
a breathless in-pace
of monkish shapes
that cry for a vocative ‘Oh!’
to hold back the fade-out,
to mouth out and focus the colour.

But the word is quite lost
in the shuffle of photos:
your shoulder turned in
to the cold of the nave
is pumice smooth,
white as a parchment.

And there, in another, the figure
is tiny, a barely perceptible gesture
staved between froth and water
by the edge of the washland erasure.

See how I flee from a snail
in this bas-de-page picture!
A one-legged sciapod,
a sand dervish jousting the whelk slough,
lancing the mount of its body.

How all the surfaces shimmer
at prime or vespers
and St Michel levitates,
sainted and weightless,
framed high above me
out of reach of my barb and my gloss.

A is for ‘abbé’, for abba
–that’s ‘Daddy’ in Hebrew,
Father of rose and clerestory–
a rhyme scheme to tie
this meandering grief
down to the point of its pain.