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

To start with O’Connell Bridge and the River Liffey (‘leaning
over on my stomach on August stone looking down’) the currents
drawn by sunlight (‘this choking weight, feet up in mid-air’)
like the day in Jack Yeats’s ‘The Liffey Swim’, whose coral
colours’ nervy flow you’ve never seen (‘dropping, ending it’).
To continue with All Hallows Church now called
St. Andrews (‘the cold smell of sacred stone called him’):
‘No Communion Today’.  Then walk southward along
Westland Row retracing those footsteps to Sweeney’s
following the guidebook (‘sending you the sweet lemon soap?’).

After a rest, it is time for the Book of Kells (‘my books
were never your kind of books’) and a closer look at those illuminated
vellum leaves: one bears a Buddha-like Madonna
with the child cupped in her arms (‘his teal-blue top just like
the fish-jade you carry round your neck for peace’).  A page-palette
of colours: iris, lilac, egg yolk and lapis lazuli
brushing against the lagoon of a Latinate ‘g’.

Curtains drawn, a desk with a chair: it is time to start.
(‘This postcard is a page from Book of Kells?’)  In the end
you’d written: ‘Though we won’t see each other again,
this is meant to last.’  (‘It did last, hidden in my wardrobe among
your presents.’)  I should have gone on (‘all the way from you to here’).
This is Dublin (‘how clearly your handwriting came to mind
before I could remember your face’).  Outside, the human traffic
dapples the busy street (‘this silence between us’).  Inside,
two angels flutter in the background behind her halo
(‘those shell-like feathers started clanking’) and I stop.