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

i.
the soul lives in
the long grass
licks itself
languidly

cat-like

you weren’t
beautiful all that
summer but had occasion
to be mad

ii.
the city had settled
down years ago
into songless concrete
and spaces
where women get hurt

you walked here
mumbling brogue
considering widows and weeds and the residue
glass makes suddenly
advanced
from sound into silence

the bones in your hand were
a fan of fragile
machinery

you watched them
waltzing your nerves
in thin air

you drove past thinking
you needed a poem
to live in to link
the dead weather
to words

iii.
you are pleased
to have the skin
removed from your current illusion
of autobiography

people were vanishing
you were still
with the speed
a human face
disappears

when you leave
letters you make
sure they are blue
and written badly

finally there will be
no audience
an echo only
of water
in your mouth

iv.
a whole war shines
in the garden
you plant in stories
weighed down with stones

sometimes liking the tideless
perfection of rivers
spilt so easily in this
sensual and medieval way

you have a desire
to know your hair
float there
long with relief
at not surviving
to write the image
longingly always
down

v.
you know there are pleasures
existences which
should have entered
into your body

milk and women
are delivered to memory
like blackmarket butter
to the scullery door

you may have even lived
insipidly
several great men never
liked you

the cat performs
small acts of savagery
beneath the rhododendrons

numbering all other
atrocities
the wireless
grittily exhales

vi.
all the houses
where you once lived now
have an interior
view of the sky

you have a husband
who records the mileage
although he knows you
are going mad

vii.
this river walking
was your last
look along the lines
of central transparency

the body is an envelope
soon sealed off
pulled down

the soul weighed
less than a manuscript
went under
with stones did not consider
its posthumous
release

viii.
they say
you were moving
towards your silence but older
censorships
had closed over
your face
icelike and long
with living
in mirrors
men had slipped
their hands inside

how cold it is
this anonymity
you under
stood we think back
through suicides left us
a question of bodilessness
and identifying forms

a litany of sinking
experiments with streams
bloodlessness
suspension
detachment

delicacies wet sand
sheep’s clothes and diaries

so no last words
rest cures
silence doesn’t.