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

1.
She is musing with the stone,
The unseen crystal wall of her brain,
The brain-well, I mean the crystal of the bone,
A working crystal-set, a set of crystals
Microscopic and encompassing, for with every
Shear or stress each crystal lights
With its minute current that sparks a wave;
And I admire these notional Primavera ringlets,
The electrical accompaniment of her thought and walk,
And the sea that is ringleted too, the foam
Like a set of crystal walls popping with current.
I propose great jars of vaseline,
Petroleum jelly, to make the body shine
With sunlight from the coal-forests, coal mirrors,
Hued like faint sunshine from the past,
Light that has been turned to leaf-mud, mud
That has been pressed to oil, close your eyes
And see light as it touches! Flying ointment,
Oil of rock, essence of witchcraft
Which is to see by light in the body.

2.
Now you wear your amplifying shirt, oily
Like silk, like cauls; he rubs the oil
On the bosom of her garment, and the tits shine
Through like great eyes opening under the sea.
Seams show like circuit-currents; just so
The old dowser stumbing finds the buried streams.

3.
Now rain silks the clothes
Which are our filters over the flesh’s immense
Lights and distances, and catch
The shooting rain’s tattoo too fast for skin.
They hold the water standing in their strands.
Each gives up its shining packet
In cotton glistening to the sun
And rainbow watered silk, we watch
The mind of heaven in those living clothes,
As the spider-wheelwright does, pausing between showers.

4.
You have changed your dress, re-tuned your skin,
There is a different machinery of glimpses
And discourse of perfumes breathing from your skirt,
Your throat, your sleeves, broadcasting as you walk
To the clothes’ caress, transmitter
And receiver; and how the true body comes
To eloquence and vibrant shape in the sea that seethes
As you run in living veils into the waves, always

The throat bare, attending on utterance.