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

It’s a grey and sullen place this haunt of Clare’s,
cold and outcast in this post-enclosure world; 
and this dialogue you conduct dissolves
like a parliament of birds around the fens
and thinning forests. With the soil
so leached it bears not even rotten fruit,
you wish communion within this room,
the dark draft of the night sky an utterance hooding
the concrete-covered pasture, as millennial
you see no point in travelling further,
as if locality were a case of gerrymander.
And deep within a Southern city
in a room stunned by masterpieces
of nature morte, a concert of birds
of unfamiliar breeds erupts as silently
as written speech; the peculiar attitudes
of stencilled verbs, the activities of painted
Grace against the backdropped herds
with their desperate plunge into the markets.
Audibly, agents of the tonal scale applaud
the scorings of the medical alumni,
as students amuse themselves with the genitalia
that will never find their way into the coffin,
as itemised the artefacts find their way
back to the old country, as Spivak tells
a tale of a language not mentioned
in the national anthem vicariously
appropriating Sanskrit; as the same
Columbia that drove out Kate Millett
might well reduce the standard of her living.
There’s no security in the hedgerows
and the birds are swollen artificially,
just as the Irish grandfather takes the boy
into the south-west Australian forests
in search of death adders edged tightly
amongst the stones of a sullen place,
that later the skin of a fable would be laid
as parchment in the family woodbox,
just to replace itself straightaway
and slink into a fatter life. Austerity
trends itself against the missal
and enriching the language of the spirit
it will bind hymnals in the skin of unborn
calves: the stone as cold as history.
Crossing at right angles the vapour trails
suggest technology and not magic,
though it is a scaffold built from gleaning,
the ice crystals crazy on the outer panes
of the glasshouse where the snake unfurls
in the artificial weather, contrived
against the restoration of a third-world
casualty ward in the heart of London,
as if it couldn’t rather than shouldn’t exist,
as New Laddism rules the streets,
happily accepting the victories
of third-wave feminism, patronising
the working class with their begotten accents,
as if the rest of Europe should take
eighty percent of the responsibility
for the primal urges of soccer hooligans,
while in The Hague they’re only willing
to cop seventy percent. One of Major’s cronies
reckons that Brits should be eating twice the beef,
that it’s all a scientific beat-up, a fraud designed
to make the bulldog nervous, the beefeaters
uncertain in their futures: it’s enough
to stir Gary Larsen across the Atlantic,
to bring him out of retirement. High
above the Bloomsbury pavements
the pressured syrinxes of crows
awkwardly suggest the horizon’s
Russian Doll occupations, as if territory
were something you’d find in a second-hand
shop, long overlooked by dealers
in antiquity. There’s nothing
to compare it to, the price is fluid;
the similitude of heat waves rising
above the central heating radiator,
the imagined polarity of the desert
counterweighting our cultural experience.
The basement in this Season of Lent
is the crypt for our sickbed sheets.
Ah, but for the cruelty of the language!
That a cab driver in Madrid will scream
against the one-third-empty moon
tallow and shady in the sullenly adjusting night:
Vaca loca! Vaca loca! Vaca loca!
as if thrice the holy confirmation
that the English with their fussy ways
and peculiar speech finally got what
they deserved: cooped-up cows gone mad!
and you, Australian, with space for wandering,
ample space for dissolving brains
to devolve unnoticed, and now starving
in this country that loves El Greco
but suffers not the passion of a vegetarian.
And though each allotment grows
a different fruit: homogenised and regulated
the market determines that every product
is the same beneath the fancy wrapping.
Genetically altered you stagger as only
the over-large can stagger, towards supreme
consistency. Where you come from
they feed the ferals bullets. There’s
no retreat to the outback: the guns
are waiting. And you know them all, having
kept a tally of the dead while working
on outback wheatbins, and in the burlesque city,
while scavenging poems out of the rural fringes,
the outer suburbs that had as yet refused
to give up their orchards and flocks of sheep.
“You get the benefits of both worlds” the delusion went.
In those Kelmscott and Armadale pubs
the boys are pure rustic, but with a twist
that gets real nasty: these lads are landless,
roisterers who stake claims in every
stranger’s face, for whom the “rape
of the land” is taking possession
of the skimpy barmaid with or without
her permission. “Would I had fallen
upon those happier days That poets celebrate...”
perturbata seu inordinata, as Euclid has it;
as unenlightened tropes siren the chartered streets,
address the rotten boroughs,
the calicius rabbit virus rampant
on the great southern land mass,
the pastoralists feverish in their campaign
to rid the lucky country of Copernicanism,
the Roaring Forties emitting LGMs,
Australia rife with speculation;
after all, Skylab crashed there
and most of your generation remember
the hoopla. The outback lends itself
to invasion, reterritorialisation:
its meteorite-pocked face burning
with visitations, lights following cars
and most on record with the airforce
as having made a sighting. On the endless
highway you look wantonly towards
your absolute future, your absolute past,
the distance burning colour from prescription
reds and blues, the clichés of antipodean landscapes:
the haze of time and space shifting
beyond the spectrum. The ripples
of such observations wash the shores
of London, the Imperial Thames dirty
with extinction and an overwhelming sense
of the present. Despite the rough moves
of petty saboteurs you persist
in your scenting of the chambers,
the brusque smells of spring wildflowers
a memory like a lost but favoured relationship,
the towers of the City eclipsing
the pornographic suburbs,
crass youngsters hiding visions of Hogarth
beneath the crisp linen and fine wool of their suits.
On the evening of Maundy Thursday
you contemplate a solitary walk,
itchy with cabin fever you meditate
the guilt of absence. A Jamaican
in the hotel lift ascribes all sickness
to ill humours brought by sullen weather.
Tomorrow you’ll make way for the flock
of Aussies and New Zealanders
who’ve made the channel crossing
with ConTiki tours: in the New Ambassador
you’ll read Henry James and lashings
of Victorian erotica! Those handmaidens
of science imbibing the transcriptions
of their constitutions, as if they were
merely part of a tableau, the scene
on a business card, where tribadism
is for the peeper’s enjoyment, a curl
of literary quirkiness, the coded
stalking in hyperspace, a jealous
suitor flaming out through the series
of receival points, the lads at play:
colonising the optic nerve, little J.P. Morgans
surfing the occupation of virtual reality
unaware that the CIA have okayed it;
like France taking Polynesia en levrette,
or the English taking to the birch
because of their isolation from the Holy
Roman Church. On this Good Friday
an alternate Calvary suggests itself
in Woburn Place. The construction crane
counterweights the glowing orange cross:
a colour and luminosity that can only be
late twentieth century. Safeways is open,
a shoe-shop is concluding its sell-out.
A new hotel rises up out of the ashes 
as if death is a temporary emptiness,
resurrection just a matter of the power
being reconnected. Like Waterloo Bridge
being almost entirely constructed
by women as their menfolk were off
fighting wars. The eagle outside
the Ministry for War faces the shores of France,
while Radjah Shelducks swim in opposing directions
to their circuits wrought in the northern
reaches of Australia. A black swan looks
complacent in Saint James Park. A nun asks
for a moment’s silence in Westminster Abbey
on Holy Saturday as tourists are drawn by the flames
of prayer candles, passing their hands bravely
through the firestorm. You wonder about Rasselas
in Happy Valley, the enticingly moist evenings
while the paddocks remain burnt and bare
in defiance of a trans-regional imagery.
In the lap of Mahatma Gandhi
there are daffodils. Near Dickens’s residence
at Tavistock House the homeless drink Super
outside a heavily bolted Social Security.
The weather man hopes it will be tolerably warm
over the remainder of the Easter break
and you realise that God is not entirely
in control, that a moment of joy is a triumph
and not a natural condition. A Landscape
of Shame flourishes: VITA BREVIS ARS LONGA:
sine qua non, as down through the poem
we vertically descend, as in Saint Margaret’s
the resurrection turns like an extension
of the Jubilee line, the ricocheting cracks
of high voltage beneath the city as trains agitate
like frantic worms, each segment of their bodies
a potential traveller on the terrestrial tracks.
Easter Sunday divides itself into galleries.
The Tate, that great nature morte with
restless insides, yields up the genetic stuff
of the millennium’s artistic treasures.
In such a way science becomes the Aesthetic
and the Crucifixion, if not the Resurrection
quod est datum. North of Happy Valley
the topsoil lifts with the strengthening breeze,
the contents of the map inhabiting the frame:
the figure-hugging lime green of this year’s
Northern fashions, as poised as English gardens.
Nature threatens barely from the outside
but stirs within uncomfortably. And Claire
Herbert, paraphrasing Jurgen Moltmann, writes:
“This God, utterly engaged with the struggles of the world,
loves even in the face of evil, suffering and death,
and calls us to follow in the way of that love.”
Formatted for both good and evil, our database contains
as many cases of Creuzfeld-Jacob Syndrome
as it does reproductions of James Ward’s “Beef”.
Cow-pokes and butchers know the beast’s
anatomy, but not its Passion. Restaurants
have begun to dump the suspect flesh
on day centres and hostels for the homeless.
And it’s forty days to Ascension.
The birds are thick in Russell Square.
In Perth it’s Monday evening and the ibises
will be flocking over Booragoon lake, angling down
to their roosting places on claws of deadwood.
That vault of Imperialism, the British Museum,
embalms the notion of an ibis, as if set
in the peaty palm of a southern swamp:
Mummified Ibis, The Bird Sacred To THOTH,
is copyrighted, or immortalised on a boffin’s
number plate. The door opens like an x-ray,
and as the bells tremble with appropriation
the eyes of the sarcophagal city
open wider than their sockets.
Bags are packed with impedimenta,
hotel bills are paid, and keys handed over;
that larrikin Adam Lindsay Gordon
remains suspiciously silent beneath the Abbey.
Another copy of The Big Issue is sold outside Dillons;
a dyke on a bike rides past with a scowl;
tattooed lads descend upon the off-licence.