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

No doubt the river lay
(like sorrow) where he least expected
and its banks overhung him

unhelpful with their timbers
crooked as a casual soul.
His weekend cottage flanks mine

and my jazz of lived countries
breeds suspiciousness in me, a welter
of cockroach feet.

But the cops think no one drowned him,
he walked himself down to the creek,
slept deep and rose next morning

smudged on the waters,
a bird that would be rare in any language
now trailing a fan

of ordinary seagulls. Instruct me
how to feel about this death?
(The river slides, is oil

from a broken sump). In which
of our shared countries
did he send to the mountains for snow

to cool his lemonade
and what was the going rate?
The mahogany walls and red plush

of those old trans-Europe trains –
you smile, but there were deaths.
I decide I ought to be glad

of this bereavement; he wasn't the sort
you invite for coffee.You suspect
someone could arrive at night

to despatch him. (Of course by accident).
He who counted the towers
now in the mortuary

his Rolex slides into the wrist flesh
with a nearly indecent haste.
I woke once; there was storm

the lightning-man weaving chains.
Later I half woke; was the planeless sky
rampant with noise, an immensely labouring

unhuman sound? Am I more sensitive
from his history and mine, a needlethrust
through the pair of us

from some discarded factory?
It always astonishes me
that a derelict needle shed

may stand harmless as any other,
its walls charred and a dead Rolex …
no, that was elsewhere.

I've never understood spies;
to my mind they resemble
blue swifts which hover

and sleep at the same time.
(Those shriek at midnight too).
Anyone with my past

would shiver at this death.
You who've innocently loved your country
are allowed to feel harmless –

you who have a country –
but for us mixed-Europeans
things are never so simple.

As Broadway ends
not in a dazzle but with the slow
seep of unnecessary tides, bare jetty,

boatyard of broken stilts
and watchman's splintery hut …
after that, anything

is possible. On his recent appointment
his publicity photos were taken
by men in balaclavas;

he smiled for the cameras
and the flowers on his desk were lilies
in a discreet shade of pink.

In other countries the ground freezes inward
but here cold erupts; from the soil
project inch-tall skyscrapers,

domes, mausoleums,
freeways, bus shelters.This is the first country
where I've walked upon cities of ice;

they mutter when you crush them.The spymaster surely
noticed this too.
(A healthier effect,

no doubt, than cities too suppressed by fear to mutter).
There's no clean explanation of the fact
that the wrecked spymaster

floating up with this morning's tide
lifted his wingless hands like blessing;
in the mental landscape we shared –

terrain of barns and falcons –
blessings are dirty work. So instruct me
how to feel about this death

and I'll refute you; there are reticences
even in folk as nearly integrated as myself.
Frequent deracination

doesn't show on the face, and yet inside
(I speak for myself only) it's quite possible
a grinning animal sits.