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

Roma. In Winter, it seldom ever snows. The rainy season starts in November and lasts through January. Night time temperatures rarely dip below the low 20’s. There are umbrella pines, palmettos and palm trees, reminiscent of South Carolina.

     In late Spring, strawberries appear and last through mid-summer. In mid-Fall, artichokes appear. Traditional Roman cooking is simple and hardy, but never heavy.

     Rome has seven hills. The Palatine Hill is marked by a large statue of Victor Emmanuel. Legend says that Romulus and Remus were brought to a hut on the Palatine after they were washed up in a basket on the banks of the Tiber.

     Pollution in the city is severe and in April, 1990, many large bronze statues were moved to the Capitoline Museu--

     She has been here fewer than five days, having arrived from New York with a group of students to spend a semester studying the Italian language. Now she sits alone in the piazza twirling her cigarette between her fingers like a little baton as she takes short, nervous puffs. She is asthmatic, and smoking is, therefore, a defiant act, the strongest of statements, like a sharp stab of perfume in an over-heated room. She feels her chest tighten as she struggles to cough up each breath and expel it like a single pearl. The act makes her feel anchored somehow, more firmly-rooted in space.

     She needs the cigarette to smooth the edges of a little flutter inside her that makes her feel as if her heart had loosed itself from its moorings. Yet she hates the smell of it, the soiled, used-up air, the way the spent smoke settles over her like ash; the way the day turns pewter sod loses its lustre; the way the buildings lose their sharp definition as if viewed through the slats of a cirrus cloud. At night, she scrubs the smoke from her skin with brushes.

     She crushes out her cigarette sod begins to walk. As she passes through the city, she feels the city passing through her, soaking her bones with its colors, its dark pewters, its alizarines, its heavy Prussian blues. For several days now, she has been able to sleep only in snatches and now she has crossed some border, hard and final as graveyard stone, and she cannot sleep at all.

     Daylight has become too sharp, too raucous, its shapes painted garish yellow with a palette knife. She prefers the oblique softness of night when she walks the streets endlessly, casting her sombre light into the alleys like a little tin star and watching her shadow rub up against the doorways like a softly purring cat.

     Her head is filled with thoughts like a nest filled with birds, Images are disjointed, ragged, pierced with quills. There is no progression, no continuity. Sentences break apart and re-arrange themselves into strange new patterns. Verbs disappear completely. Nouns and adjectives prick her skull like little knives. Syllables break off and clump at the ends of words. Paragraphs spin about and sting each other like bees.

     Every morning she sits in the piazza. Large sunglasses smooth the edges of the city and keep her secret and apart, like a maja behind a painted fan. The rosy point of her cigarette burns down against her palm and leaves a little nipple of ash. She drinks the coffee, thick as river mud and laced with an airy fichu of hazelnut and cream.

     She watches the family at the next table and knows they are talking about her, whispering behind the silky snakes of their fingers. She feels powerful, Medusa-like, as if her mere glance can turn their thoughts to stone.

     She remembers that tomorrow they will go to Venice and she thinks of red gondolas, their prows carved and bent like the necks of painted swans, gliding on dark waters lifted gently on prongs of light. Suddenly she is distracted by the voices squabbling inside her head, the skullful of strident sounds juggling for position.

     She leaves her seat and approaches an old woman at another table. She seeks to make some contact, to throw down an anchor with her voice. She watches the way the woman’s face catches the light and holds it like a smooth glass bowl; the way her eyes begin to shimmer and glisten like shells backlit by a single bulb.

     She roots in her head desperately, looking for words, as if rooting in a purse for loose change, but she finds nothing. As the woman’s face goes out like a little candle, she is overcome with panic and falls back into herself like a collapsing star. Little bits of her life swim past her like painted fishes.

     She can no longer bear the openness of the piazza, the crushing weight of space, and she returns to her room. The casa is staffed by an order of brothers whose long robes swish softly through the halls, brushing the walls lightly like the fins of mermaids. Each night a single brother sits at the desk with a book, his profile sharply outlined in shadow against the wall like the sharp edge of a Balinese puppet. But their language is alien to her with the soft voluptuousness of its phrasings, the sensuous curves of its vowels.

     Finally, the director of the school asks to see her. He is solicitous, concerned. She sees his, sitting at his desk, his head a coin of light, his arms dissolving slowly into a wall dark as milkless tea, his body cut off at the waist like an ancient statue buried deep in sand. His words enter her like thin cardboard letters dropped soundlessly through a skinny slot. Inside her head, they become louder and louder, opening inside her skull like crocuses.

     She is sitting once again in the piazza. A lady in a red silk dress passes. As she turns the corner, she dissolves into flames. Sounds fill her head like a rush of bells, hard geometric cadences -- trapezoids, rhomboids, oxagons, hexagons of sound. Nero, she remembers, fiddled while Rome burned. Then she feels the flames, hot and lacey beneath her skin, as it slowly takes on the crisp colors of an illuminated manuscript. She thinks of Romulus and Remus and the dull yellow teeth of wolves. On the Palatine Hill, strange nightbirds appear and draw new shapes with the quill tips of their shadows. Light splashes on the stones of the Coliseum. The Trevi Fountain casts up a single bouquet of stars.

     She is overwhelmed by the intensity of the imagery, as if, with one, sudden, unexpected lunge, her life had been switched from black and white film to color, It is no longer necessary to sleep to dream. Life itself has now become a dream, a floating world within a world, many worlds containing and sheltering each other like a series of nesting Russian dolls that shrink into progressively smaller knobs within each others’ skirts.

     Across the piazza, a man is exiting from a car. His opaque body, the color of milk spilled on white marble, bends slightly and his limbs arch out from his torso like waves as if his wrists and ankles were scarves instead of bones. He is so long, so thin, so pliable that he seems to lap back against himself, to flow out from his center and return.

     She sees him coming toward her, cleanly, clearly, like a shark propelled through the water by a single fin. He comes closer, until his eye, a hard scarab of color, a lozenge of light, opens its pupil and she swims through it into darkness. She is crushed by sound. She does not know whether she is perpetrator or victim, predator or prey, whether she is bullet or gun, whether she is creating light or expelling it like a retracting star. The shrill sounds pierce her like a bouquet of arrows loosed from their quiver.

     Under Julius Caesar, the Romans conquered Gaul. Travellers to Rome are advised to guard their pocketbooks carefully. The Trevi Fountain, one of Rome’s most popular attractions, was built between 1732 and 1762 at the spot where three roads meet. It is said that those who toss a coin into its waters are destined to return one day to Rome.