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

     An indefinable nocturnal smell that brings me an obscure, exquisite and tender doubt enters through the open window into the room where I am working.

     My cat lies in wait for the night, upright, like a jug . . . A treasure with a subtle gaze is watching over me with its green eyes . . .

     The lamp is singing its soft song, as gentle as the song heard in a shell. It stretches out its calming hands. I hear the litanies, the choruses and the responses of the flies in its areola. It lights up the flowers on the edge of the terrace. The nearest approach timidly to look at me, like a troop of dwarfs discovering an ogre . . .

     The little violin of a fly persists. It is like someone playing a solo in a very distant house . . . Insects fall diagonally and vibrate gently on the table. A butterfly as blond as a straw foetus drags itself along the little valley of my open book . . .

     A clock weeps. Memories dance a childish round dance . . .

     The cat splits from top to bottom. Its nose describes some invisible flight into the air . . . A fly has placed its scissors in the lamp . . .

     Kitchen sounds pile up in a backyard. Contradictory voices are playing at fly-away-pigeon. A car drives off. A train cries out in the nearby station. A far-off, long lament rises up . . .

     And I think of someone I love and who is so small because he is so far away, perhaps beyond black countries, beyond deep waters. And of his eyes that I cannot see . . .