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

An invasion mechanism: the fish sift the water.
They ingest the right particles, also the wrong.
Bacteria implode under the stomach’s pressure.
Surviving microbes migrate to dorsal flesh.

Two freshwater biologists in a smack, upstream.
An hypothesis as thin as the paper they wrote it on.
Tears at bedtime for fish with the bacterium-strain.
Their eyes, pustular. Their considerations, air.

A boat, humped over, in the littoral of a river.
A beetle heading – where – across its bow.
Science at midnight on the far edge of a lake.
Our best work carried out on the shore of sleep.

The observations: tiny, as essential as daybreak:
a reedbed rowing its sundial out of sync;
a spider hauling dead up in rainbows;
and Saprolegnia, a parasite of fish.

I turned into a fish one morning and drowned.
Fish-hearted at The Benefit, I had lost my face.
How I swam into unemployment. How my girl’s face knew.
In Parasite Science, no place for this knowledge.

The humane director of the freshwater laboratory.
He was ‘released from employment’ with one week’s notice.
His final task was to sack all his staff.
I met him twice afterwards. We had lost our faces.

He lost himself in a gardener’s job.
The Park’s Department had a place for his knowledge.
Someone, somewhere has place for our knowledge.
The local park had the place for his knowledge.

Christ calls from the kitchen. We make lunch together.
Fish. Let’s grill them, but we strip off their skin.
We flense off the parasites, wait for the five thousand.
Then I wrap him in white lines like a Bird Eating Spider.