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

Must it be that I am laid so low
that I must fall in full view
in the road at the heart
of the village in full view
in the road where tarmac becomes sand
where a mirage shimmers over it like lake-water
that I upturn in I splash in I sprawl
down in the sand?
                                        A deer,
shot through from some arrow,
sang from the edge of the clearing
and fell with a look of wonderment
and a gentle flow of urine
that stained the sand a small patch of yellow.

Must I too suffer this ignominy
for no reason?
                        O reason, great father of reason,
you have nothing to give but answers
that are not answers,
                                    reasons
that are little more than a man
watching in his coat and hat, a spy spying
and being clever with his machinations.

The corner shop is there, the post office,
the RSPCA coin-box, the telephone kiosk
(still of the old red kind). The hank is busy,
the village is in its heyday, the bread shop,
the buttons shop and shop of ornaments
all there with their open signs and bells tinkling.

But I am lost to them.
I am from a different time,
invisible as air.
Yet the car
up by the butchers shop,
its slow approach,
has the corporeal weight
to crush me

because I am sinking
in the sucking sand
unable to reach the far shore.

Around me, villagers are busy
buying cake and brittle toffee,
their old fashioned bicycles
propped against lamp-posts,
granary loaves in their front baskets,
pasties, in brown paper bags,
still warm from the oven.

They don’t see me
down here in the road.
They don’t hear me
muffled, as I surely am, by the sand.
Only he, in the shop doorway,
in his mackintosh and dark spy’s hat -
he is from my time.

So I cry out to him:
‘My legs won’t stand won’t stand me!
and he hears this, he hears
and while I thrash
in the sand in the road
reaching for the far shore I can’t reach,
he hangs in the doorway
hands in his pockets
eyes disguised

my beholder
my witness
from my own time

and the car -
interminable, its approach.

The other side
is a place I recognise
I’ve been there once
there is a house with rooms
I know the feel of
there are pavements
I could stand my weight on

but my hands, their knuckles,
are white from clinging to some edge.
The fingers buckle
under the weight of holding
to the near shore,
where the villagers have gathered
to point and call
(though am I lost to them?)

and he, who waits, there
in the shop doorway
he waits

waits and waits

however long
it is a waiting

and in this awakening
- the relief, the release -
I raise my hands

open both palms to him
in welcome

and die like the deer
whose tears the poet sings of

and in this single act
this loosening off of grasp
faces occur in this place of sand
two four twenty more than a hundred
in this road this mid-way point of mirage
faces come, some of whom I know -
villagers, also with their bodies braced,
knuckles tight, shoulders against whatever strife
is theirs,
             and somehow I reach the far shore
as if carried
                        not of my doing
and standing, I glance back towards the door-
way, knowing it, of course, now, to be empty.