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

Always at a gaze wherelowered eyes meet to look at it,
a pool where seldom toes of feet touch to cool on days
when the sun rears at its most heated hours. You may
appear to have many unpleasant chins when casting down
your head, it is as well to be slim of face for the aim
of the male animal needs to fall within certain peri-
meters lest the sock is spoiled. The pool is like the
ground, like a part of it, a modification, a well raised
up in clay and made to stay a certain fathom. It is
bright at first then becomes discolored as human element
infuses it, with a gain of alchemical fluid. But once
the serum for gold is passed into other soils, clearness
resumes, it is formless and fresh, passive yet to gain
again one’s meditative reflection. Its one vice is to
shimmer one’s image upon its surface. When a substance
under certain pressures transfuses it and likens it to
squash, it will dispose by extraordinary means to satisfy
its vice of mirroring the faces of others, with occasional
twisting, piercing, eroding, filtering. It is as if in
a scorn of its own watery collapse, by means outside of
itself, a sacrifice of’ consistency via discoloration,
that it will remake like a flower’s cup in the early
moments of morning. It will humble itself a little, like
a monk in the presence of man. One might say it is mad
to gain a level which is contrary to waters beyond stone
walls where its strength suffers from evaporation and
is thus put to flight. It will obey gravity yes, but only
that afforded by the pudding bowl of its own comfortable
seclusion.