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

When I drink I sound like a horse gulping
gallons of rain caught in a trough. You sound
just a thirsty horse in the stable after the race
my mother used to say she sounds just like a horse.
She drinks an invisible glass of water glug
glug glug glug    glug glug.
To me that sounds German for lucky. Happy, no?
Mother slams down the invisible glass.

And father well sort of speaks fluent German
even though we never hear him utter one word of it.
Not one. Not a syllable. Not as much as a polka dot
or the word for stop or cold. Not even in his sleep.
Not even when he drinks -
His wound a bruised silence we tiptoe round
is a silence he mumbles bleary eyes and thoughts away,
away and gone,
lips so sealed we might as well hand him a straw.
We don't drink through straws my mother says. We sip.
I guess some wounds always stay in the race.

I see his wound quite a bit, wrapped tight as a sniffed-stiff fusty scarf
around his neck, turning a busy street comer. Am I being too clear?
Transparently so mother shines - like glass.
She slams it down. It is snowing. It snows.
Snow falls and falls and drifts, ruefully combative as only snow can
be and obliterate - can he hear the sound of snow?
Snow melts the sound into the patient earth, and as he pauses
in a deep-rooted buckled sigh, did it soothe the wound or freshen it?
Well he never did talk we say, what we see is the sound of him naming it.

I see his wound staggering at the gates to some park, diverting
his slow body in the direction of the public loo,
trying to compose a Parisian confidence of cleanness and change –
who is he meeting, coming out as I am going in?
I see he left some mark, a thumbprint smeared on the mirror,
a hair floating in the sink. Hesitant then sped up I call out
after him as he paws the flakes of snow as if groping for things to say.
One clutches at straws my mother says not drink from them.
And raises her glass like it sets us free again.