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

Noon; sparrows chit-chitting. No crickets. The flick of a lizard. Pears dripping green, gold, red. Convolvulus tutus, icing-sugar-pink. Nougat stone; brick mottled salmon, terracotta, soot, chewing-gum grey. Dark clusters of elderberries like roe, each fruit silvered by last nights rain.

        The hammock sagging like a ripe belly, a fish slung to dry. From the other side of the house a roll of guitar chords; then the buzzards call dropping down through layers of still air like a small gilt arrowhead, delicate and potent as a first kiss. Over Source Sud a pair of black kites flipping and rolling around each other like dolphins.

        Smells of wet juniper and pool chlorine. Goggles squinting emptily into the distance. White plastic chairs lounging like partygoers: waiting for something to happen, or already full with its passing? Abandoned yellow lilo and the distant figure of a woman asleep, breasts rising and falling.

        A sense that someone has just left; their presence still spread like a blanket over the grass. The day an opened book; its events ciphers and words and paragraphs, fading as soon as they’re born.

        Noons whiteness. We turn the page. A bell; and then another. The buzz of a distant motorbike.

        Walking through this day; its furrows, its pools, its shadows. Lacewing cracks in the air between us.

        On the lump, the barrow, the soil feels thin, its bones pressing the soles of our feet. Walking downhill, the slope of the afternoon stretching before us across the fields. They’ve cut the straw; soil stubbled like an old man’s chin. The day hedged around now by green darkness into which, at last, everything will fall.

        Gunmetal stains in the west. Dusk a ripe plum dropping down a deep well, the splash almost inaudible, the whisper of a cry.

        Against these shadows we plant acres of sunflowers like laughter, corn as fat as hugs.

*

This garden is somewhere else, bordered with jewel-green crickets and swallow-song. Sunflowers crowd up to the hedge, heliotropic gyrations ticking away the day. The older ones are bent, like bonneted arthritic dames.

        The willow gathers blue shade and fritillaries; its pool of shadow bristles with grass-stalks and crickets. A swallowtail skips the elderberry clusters, dances towards the reddening pears. The seventh day. No sound except the church clock at Marsac.

        The stone of the house is sandy-white, chalky and crumbling like Cheshire cheese.

        There are people, a pool. A grass-snake looped by a rock.

        This garden is walked by sky, the soil beaten dry by southern sun.

In another country, by a garden wet with last nights rain, he’s framed by a window, collecting the sky in his eyes, the sun narrowed to a point in his pupils. He has refined photosynthesis. The sun spawns visions like leaves, or circling birds; a halo of words around his head. You are not there; never were.

*

Sometimes in the night I think I hear your footsteps, see you stretch a hand to lead me into your country, your mind which is incandescent with lights like Christmas candles, or still like a deep pool inhabited by golden carp, thoughts which fan the water as delicately as fins, barely rippling, or flick in a shower of neon across to the other shore, leaving me gasping for breath.

        Sometimes you arrive like a flamenco dancer; sometimes a small wind swimming through leaves, and as I turn you’ve already left, and only the trees swaying to show your passage.

        Sometimes you are an incantation on the lips of someone else; a vowel just caught, a syllable not quite uttered, a faraway tune,

        Sometimes you are a hawk hanging on the wind.

I like it best when I turn from the kitchen where sunlight is stroking the tiles and walk out into the summer morning, grass still wet and the garden shaking off night, and you’re there in the extravagance of hibiscus or under the lime tree; or waiting on the doorstep in the basket of bursting figs, bloom still untouched, like tomorrow.