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

ARC 33.89

     What can be seen from the left hand. No longer the vernacular road, no longer the political road, the way to the capital. Landscape as space deliberately created to speed up nature, query, to slow down nature, query. Shows man his shoulder for the role of time. Not of all earth: of one specific place to which road goes; not of earth wholly but one place only. Not the great city; not an imperium easy to find, easy to visualise over your all - but the small place: poor, tucked among motivations, mountains and valleys, hills, river sources, the smiles of flowers. A great mouth hidden, out of which you came; the only mouth, the one and only, smiles right across that wide horizon going from left to right of your bay window - what though that mouth repeats itself over the earth, smiles everblue from the whole universe?
 
     Hearth; field; wildwood: three concentric circles leading you home. Beyond the given, consumerizing home, all wild - horrida silva - unusable, to which one never travelled, where the various gods displayed their awe. Marge: margin, exploitable forest, home of wild grass that the cattle may find change of fine pasture. Is this the place? To have no dead in the place; no roots; no children - only the mind roving like wind over the place: is this home's name? A place from which the bells are heard: that is a home - but bells are silent here; he does not hear them; he's never heard them outside inmargination. They're come to desert then: ocean of sand, all profit margins erased and buried, to be born grandsons, both for voice and lineage.

     Waiting. Sun turns around the house. Still sitting, waiting. Sudden strikes window, floods in through window, floods over page. Sun doing all. Sun doing everything, they nothing. Classless society is here: they merely have it, no effort whatsoever. Now nothing happens. The threat is nothing happens - for a long time. Can depth not be achieved in nothing happens? That the not-happening spread out, like a vast sheet, fall inward, full of fish of nothing happens. World suddenly in place in the not happens. An absolute of nothing nothing happens. The absent of all buckets.

 ARC 35.89

     His hills and valleys stand about his outing. From century to century, looks up, cognizes fortune. Clear north wind day. Waters dream over all, sea both in sky and under sand - unperishing, uninterrupted fire. Sun shoulders shadow, slant falls across both pine and juniper. Out of silence, wisdom bats softly, always occult at the head of the eye, blinking among her foam of feathers. Tan feathers and the rising horns. If he forget both fire and origin of breath, he grounds among the hills and valleys. How stands this fortune as he glares at day by day, unwilling to collapse into the deathful?

     Absence of name, void as fields between stars. This place astonishing. Pure field. Mile upon mile of field (every conceivable direction) - plus up and down, plus centre. The farthest place he's ever come to. He did not know; he was not sure; he'd have to look for proof - but then again he might have found, might have discerned, the treasure island. That this perhaps at last, this might have been, the innermost, most immanent, core of his darkness. In the midst of which, with nothing round it for a thousand miles, they'd built a Center of Centralized Studies the like of which no one had ever seen. But studying in which, he could not move at night a few suburban blocks down to his home.

     Womb as restraining matter: flower of flower as such we are bound to, lining from which we float into this birth. Inside? Seed of itself, exciting him, slaking the soul out of enamorment which then can summon her and kneel down before him. Petals distill a dew to fall from crown to root of darkness, then to flow up again to other petals at body's ultimate, most diminutive mouth. Where sun awaiting beggars the trick. Of she what has been eaten is a field of produce sown from her every pore. She drenches out his dew into the earth - and with it all attachment to the withered flower. Freedom! He'll copyright the thing so that it stays a secret, no fodder for the vain. Only their bees come alive, self-born of their own honey. Patrivore and Matrivore devour each other in showers of fine laughter.