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

                                              I

There was the tree, something that was looked at,
and there was the word for it
sent among its branches, two different modes
encountering one another, the image
and the sound of it. There was a hovering
just then, a holding back. What had a word
to do with a tree? What place had it here?

                                               II

Something that was looked at,
    that was familiar
    only to the eye,
suggesting a sound for itself, another way

of existing in the world; an image
    finding some kind of equivalence
    in sound, the look of it –
its branches, its green leaves, their

movements in the wind – all clamouring to enter it.
    An entering and a leaving, the tree resting only briefly
    in the sound of itself, a passing through,
the word, the beginnings of a word, falling off it like a shell.

                                              III

What sound does an image speak?
What did the grass say to them, the water,
the trees…? Was there a language
other than the language of their own sounds,
their own rustlings? Was there a character
to the tree, a figure, almost, within it,
that spoke to them the perfect sound of itself?

                                               IV

A sound from within themselves,
breathy and warm,
casting itself upon its bare branches;

an object in the world
beginning to put on a part of them
so that it hung there like a skin.

                                               V

Sound could go anywhere. It was a shout
echoing across a valley; it was a woman laughing
so that it rose above her like smoke,
her body shaking like a flame.

But this was the placing of it on a stone,
on a tree, a turning of the head
so that the sound alighted where it needed to;
a laying down, a touching, a tenderness.

                                              VI
Maybe one word
and then another,
this sound or that sound
being laid on it
and taken off again;
or forgotten, or half-used;
a tree of many names, a
flock of strange birds
coming and going
among its branches.

                                               VII

That moment when they turned away from it,
when they took the sound, their word for it,
back into their lives, into their dwellings

and spoke it in the darkness for the first time,
the tree coming to life among them,
a small flame passed from person to person.

                                               VIII

Some rough-edged sound
turning in their mouths
and gradually taking shape;
the word, the finished sound,
waiting in the heart of it
as if held in ice.

                                                 IX

There was the first utterance, the first person
in whom the sight of it was changed into a sound,

an image becoming a word, their body, their flesh and bone,
the place where it happened, where the image

was transmuted. Changed and yet not changed,
the tree, the look of the tree, standing in

the sound, in its very centre, so that the word for it
glowed from its branches, its own kind of light.

                                                  X

A tree with its sound hanging from it and a world around it
where sound hadn’t ventured. In the distance
a mountain, a lake,
regarded but no more – white mountain, black lake –
so that the tree was loosened from its background, was no longer
of a piece with its surroundings but a new creation,
half a thing of the world, half of themselves.