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

Blown wood-ash, a föhn of flour, a sleety
migraine in the headlamps. We parked
and walked into the first firs of our wood
just as that fitting and starting
became the weather’s truth. The clouds’
leadwork tore and split, and the cold’s
serious stars came spilling through,
as luminous and many as salt.

Snow we said. As you’d say Hello again
old Sphinx. Its pulsars were more than quick,
spilling through the fan-vaults of the beeches,
subsuming the pavement set with bronze leaves,
the aisles and lancets frilled by scrub and ilex.
Now that its rhythm was established,
the snow fell, and fell on, as something
new, expanding and consolidating its metaphor.

But the path through a white-out is always
misleading: snow’s arts and graces
never accept closure. We were a long time,
walking the knowing unparsed silences
between the constellations, dodging through
Orion and Cassiopeia in the humus-rich
smell of cone and resin, and the claggy
dank of clay, or the cold grave breath of stone.

The Great Bear stalked the Pleiades
until they embraced in a suicide plunge.
The moons of Triton juggled on our breath,
now a crisp white, sharp as sugar. Behind
the hazels Andromeda’s nebula span down
and spread itself, like a length of curtain-net,
on the crumpled iron-work of brambles.

Before long we were trampling the density
of galaxies. When you stumbled
and reached out to a branch, your hand
must have touched the rudder of the Plough.
The wood swung round in the starfall,
and we were half-blinded by spray.
For a time it was not our wood, all troughs
and peaks, but the ocean of myths
and exactions Odysseus sailed without
a map. Surf creamed over our shoes
and we were never to get the milk stain out.

But there is always a coming back. An Ithaca
and an old dog by every nature’s hearth.
Called in (in a fashion) by the dark
and the clay-cold, we left a last sentence,
about the raw smell of infinity, and its amount
in snow, uncountable digits of snow,
at large in the wood – from which it takes
the occasional walk across the harp of
my inner ear, where it hopes to live a little
longer than me, in a robe of print, a revenant
shod with Roman font, repeating itself
in the trees: calling, with an owl’s facility,
through the long hollow reed of the dark.

Then there was the door, the step, rimmed
with more fluorescence. And the coming in,
or giving the impression of coming in
– but which is really our element? –
to knock that fossil light from soles and heels;
to blink galaxies from our lashes; to cough out
the phlegm of boundlessness; to free myself
from the scales of Libra; to brush Capricorn
and Sagittarius from your shoulders and hair.