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

Stretched out on the floor of this flat,
it gathers no maritime mist -
but the land is still a written-on white
and the marks that are not written
on the clouds that pillow the cockpit
are the codes that crack this landscape.

In a pink blob at the island’s core,
to the right of a grub-shaped azure slick,
intersected by a dowsing-rod of outlined fawn
and a scored thin lime of jet,
there’s a cross on a square black base,
the abbreviations PH and LC,
a couple of mills and a tower.

It’s so quiet
that the sound of the horse in the field,
of the rattling bottles and revved-up cars,
of the coats that brush the pebbledash,
are as nothing to the tap of my fingers -

and the banter of the teenagers bored in the square
as the pubs clear out and the stragglers disperse,
or the TVs turned up to dispel the fog
that whitens the foolscap of the heavens
are as nothing to the breeze
through this open window.

And the room in which you sit
and cradle dandelion wine,
surrounded by heaps of logs and books
by an old black stove is as tiny
as a flea that settles,
house-sized,
on the village.

There’s no sound from Cilgwyn
or from Cwyrt and Ceidio
and both Bodafon and Parys
are as still as the skin folds
on two resting knuckles.

The blue extends
to the squared-off world-edge -
the sky-coloured grid divides the island
regardless of contours, where the old-style phones
as vast as mansions are hooked up to the roadsides.

But the South Stack’s light can’t reach this place,
nor can the breakers on the Skerries
or the traffic on the Menai Bridge -
the woods of Llwydiarth where our feet fell
are bereft of our infinitessimal prints,
the rusted Bendix can’t be scried
nor the apples that you scrumped
from the unexpected.

My topographical promiscuity
as you put it places the world
in a box of eye-sized replicas
to be craved, then cruised
from world-eyed restlessness.

What remains is surface.
What remains is contained.
What remains is finite.
What remains can be folded -

a flatland gouged with names
no larger than the eye
that moves across it,
eating its locations
and its rights of way.

Its fifty thousand minds
are reduced to a printed circuit
as the fog rolls over my eyes,
with the false topography of folds
creating absurd origamis -

it’s an emptied island
that you live in now,
stripped of its saturated grass,
its grazing animals,
its walls and chimneys.

I am here, with my memories as flat as paper
despite my attentions and the map is grounded.
I look down from an aircraft’s height
at the village where you shelter
but there s no chance of a parachute,
no hope of landing alive -

so all I can do is fold up the map
and return your cottage to its hide,
unable to hear the clink of bottles
or the crackle of logs in the stove.

The map will persist in its box.
The map survives its places.
The map is the veil of the landscape
and confines me as I scan,
despite the moon that parts the clouds
and whitens the grey skin of the village -

despite my memory’s albedo
and the wax of the planetary surface
that I slide across as I write
from void to void via void,
a swift graffiti
soon expunged.