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

   kami naraba
yurara-sarara-to
   ori-tamae!*

I

Among the grains how small you were
Dry in the desert of your image

You did not hear the cries of love as you passed
Down the street, you did not see
The spittle
Fly nor the beads of blood on the axe blade

The naked masked woman
Twice she swung it & once more & high
By its long handle

II

Here we are travelling from place to place

Here I keep you hidden
Held by a great lightness
Body & voice if I could set you free

In my cage a castle rose to its turrets
Only for mice & a flock of ravens
Pure columns unbent by thought
Here they shall flower from our stillness
Voice their future dream
Of being trees

Plant them giving shade in a field
For five cows composing a sign for us
The diagonals of a dice
Or it is the pentagram —
Hidden in a bed the conversation of bodies
Hidden I keep them

And still there is a voice
Whenever in sweet nakedness you nuzzle me
Voice I want you not only to say

A white cow is made of cream & fury

— Hathor

So your face took shape
It was in the boulders uphill before us
A movement of lines to the measure of a dance
A flashing of earth years Egyptian axes & eyes
No time at all in which it happens

One hundred thousand horses
Toppling off the crag were chopped into food
For the hands that peeled leaves of laurel
Out of the flint core
Now in a field of old rain goofily like a fortress
A red horse was planting his hooves
— Look how it is to stand there

Devastation
Marks no tracks of ours
Lightly now through these hidden places we shall walk
Where mouths collect & change to make expressions
Listen
A street with many twistings this one

Lightly you are here you had no weight whatever
Wearing your little cloak over so much nakedness
You leaned against me

III

                               1
Body of light
        Dwelling in a piss jet
Or particular cherry blossom

             Look, a spirit
Wanted something
        A sign, to be manifest
                     In all directions

    Never
Sure, inhaling itself
                     A whirlwind

                               2
           Desire, pressing
On silence
        To lure you, poem
One or two words

    Go
To the southern shore
               One flesh we pursue

                               3
        One, through Never —
A span, slightest across
           Perdition, horrible
     Deep, the gurgle

                          It is
Pepper behind my eyes, it fashions
         The eye of the hurricane
It fills
                 With snakes & stars
The liquid cathedral collapsing across
         Atolls, Florida keys

                               4
          World, great harp
   Built of blood
                   Now then
          What sounds in flight

What muscular forms of breath
          Never flow, leap
   Up the torrent & restore

          To you
   Your open tunes

                               5
          One flesh —
Other, another
               Horizon, ancient
     Unplaceable

Twitter your speech again
        Models
     Out of oblivion
The bud & the wave & the snowflake

                               6
          Your never is yes,
Out of nowhere the cry
                        Gone & again
Cupola, welling, spiral, it lifts from

                  The bird throat

                               Soon hushed

                               7
            But song, in
Some few broken
                    Tombs

A touched sex

IV

Difficult
       Piecing the life together

              ‘like a supper in the wind’
How it comes, goes
                    Exact from perception
Rhythm

                                    Not snatching
                 It comes in waves
Not knowing me from you
      A spirit cannot be spoken
Or spoken of

Drums drumming the exact measure
Dancer to dancer the flower spray is passed

To build for you a space
         In this drain of being it is I
   Smash the heads & fix famine
A floor strewn with rock-orchid
                                          Lotus roof

In mid-air, air dangerous with heat
          Carbonic gas, beams of cassia
I have suspended
     A floorspread weighted down with white jades

Margins, like these
       Then at sun up to have leapt into
The blue fragrant living sea

Profit motive melts the poles
               Paris drowning, Bombay
Alexandria

I have hung strips of flesh at porch & gate
         The flesh of children

The time will not come again
                         It will not come again