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

Some days I just stop and want you here beside me
– even though you’ll be home in an hour or so
and nothing is wrong – it’s a need to charm the Fates
as if I could wear the nearness of love as an amulet.
On these days, if you return unexpectedly
then even light releases its breath.

I don’t breathe easy. I’m too aware
of the preciousness of air, its vitality
held in such a fragile vessel as a body.
Such a slight thing – a sigh – to hold a life.

I feel it now, high in the quick shallows,
air sucked in and out so fast I try to compensate,
breathe deeply until everything constricts and I
could drown              a wave of pale blue tulle
     ruched and full, perfume – Mother going dancing.
I must have been involved with those little pots of rouge,
white downy powderpuffs.   She showed me
the absence of her breasts.   Scorched maroon skin’s texture
rough and mottled and a hollowness, as if her selfness
had been burned in to the bone.

Sea-whispers rustling between every snowy tissue layer
in the box that held the folded dress. My sudden breasts
terrifying as first blood.

Christmas:   blue cedars heavy with snow, sunset
firing the smooth white shadowed garden:   stillness.
      When she died, the whirlpool of her breathing
collected every living breath within the house to sough
and rattle, rasp within her branded concave chest
the whole house breathless        and black
filtering under the doors like suffocating ash.

I can’t remember her. There’s too little, only this
constricting legacy of heavy air around the heart
and this need sometimes, for the simple anchor of your kiss.