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

The incidents which I will now relate are offered as a footnote:
Somehow I found myself in the middle of a labyrinth of lanes,
disappearing into entrances of impenetrable blackness,
long passages leading to inner and still darker stairs,
this, and many another wild passage.
After their endless stairs,
enter these impressive doors and you are immediately in the attic.
A number of black wooden boxes can set some mechanism in motion;
A stone dado-rail and a mahogany balustrade
lie about in indescribable confusion:
a sort of parallel to this is
the persistence of the bartizan-like stair,
the sharply diminishing perspective of
‘droven’, ‘stogen’ and ‘scabbled’ work, ailing chimneys
and – yes! – Ionic columns a quarter engaged,
said to make the observers giddy.
A house is only a cave for the night,
designed for the discomfiture of pigmy man.
Picturesque things are meaningless.

Photography has confirmed the story of old travellers:
A jetsam of grey monuments, so detached and alien
it is difficult to bring these facts in line with one’s grasp of reality.
The author, in the mask of a Londoner,
in the graveyard reserved for himself,
sniffs disdain and sneers reputations away. Be that as it may,

a good deal has gone, and the lovers,
blae as a dead-man’s eye,
held fêtes champêtres under Chinese lanterns,
dancing shadows among the coloured meats.

Brave Dr Cameron, with blood in his hair,
the first living authority on the Great Roc’s eggs
standing by with watchful curiosity,
has been broken and atrociously repaired.

Two strangers, pausing to admire
the unending stream of humanity flowing swiftly past the unchangeable rock,
were able to summon
the unhuman phantasmagoria.

The incorrigible ghosts at the game of peever,
drawing cabbalistic chalk marks on the pavement flags
somehow fell out and fought together.
They liked the taste of actuality.

According to the urbane Captain Topham
suicides are supposed to be deterred by
red-herrings and pianofortes.
When they die, they are changed into seagulls.

Their bright troubadour costumes were faded.
Italian gallants, lacking opportunity to identify their pleasures,
horribly excited, yelp in sympathy
enthusiastically, even comically.

In front of fictitious portraits of fictitious kings
Mr So-and-So the Artist
signed with blood for want of ink.
Like a man made o’ haar, developed, as it were, in this dark room.

Desiring an impressive ruin (it would seem) they did not wait for Time.
My people were torn to pieces.

To the Superfluous Library! -
A diverting piece of Piranesian rhetoric in stone
(they say it was a library)
east-windy, west-endy
(a well-kept, old-fashioned, half-deserted library) -
in coldly elegant pentagons
symbols have changed.
A book was borne as part of the ritual.
Each Sphinx, from its eyrie,
Made their own fancies about it.
(the hum of a necromantic wheel)

(which, alas, I cannot imitate)
I felt like Zobeidé in the Petrified City.
Something surely would have happened.

But all have gone now.

It is not that the night confuses.
The lights disappeared from the windows,
the re-arrangement of Nature
plays a queer effect in the interior of the rooms.
If all reports were true,
the original building, disappearing piece by piece,
with ‘eldritch screech and hollo’
cracked the massive tombs in the wildest ways,
the pallid light, now cold and rifled and degraded
in an old cracked rose-bowl,
lying in an ash-heap,
lay.