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

I drove westward past blue houses
in clearings cwtched
by the folding
of hills;
the road fell toward foaming cloud.
Sheep, too white for this landscape,
mushroomed between bones of rock.
Men in middle years chained wood
below telephone wires still trembling from
                                                    the storm
which waited for distant calls to rattle in
                                                        the line.
Stone walls trickled down the hillsides
heading for the sea.
Beyond ‘The Dead Man’ lay on
an Atlantic horizon.
I pulled darkness up
from the water through
a squint of sunlight.

A slip of road and I chanced upon it.
Frank’s place.
He sat in front of the Smithwick’s mirror
cursed the broken radio, took orders
and then recited poetry,
Yeats he’d learned at school.
It slid out through partially opened lips
in monotone, a personal warning.
Then he sat, head down, moved, and said,
“That’s all I know.”

I knew something strange had happened.

And after a shard of silence he spoke
of the scar on his temple, the severed finger,
the car accident and how the sound
had remained undiluted even twenty plus years
                                                                 on.

In the mirror I watched one man
walk to the water’s edge,
to the only unbeached boat.
He pushed it out as Frank
recalled the forgotten lines of Yeats.

Both men were close to tears,
well I was sure one was.
Frank turned to me and said,
“Glass is dangerous stuff you know,
it can be savage to the eyes.”

I left, Uilleann pipes played a caoineadh
the drones I recognised.
Then as I stood beside the rested car
whose windscreen was starting to cloud
concentric outward ripples moved
from the lake’s centre and a head,
the size of a finger tip,
disappeared beyond all sight.