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

Your presence has forecast a long night,
star-ridden, hemmed-in, without need
to lay seige, though words might
freeze where they mark boundaries.

You remove shoes, a gold bracelet,
breathe on it before laying it aside,
look over your shoulder lest
something disturb the air around us.
Outside the moon homes in on the horizon,
nuzzling the rise of the sleeping hill:
Hecate with her three heads.

Touch is a slow squeeze
attuned to the earths fine movement.
Small talk then silence.
the moon resting on a bed of cloud, Astarte;
expanding the night with star-shine.

What can it matter since no one owns us?

*

A night’s dream of long days;
dreams we needed to make things work,
but there are things we could not change,
we were older, yet unburdened of the new.

Conversation;
so much silence to be felt,
a long white corridor where air thins
and snatches breath.

You curl into my shoulder,
listen to night sounds.
we tilt heads to catch the mesh of starlight;
an endless change.

*

I have looked at faces and seen
only the eyes of survivors,
heart-filled, yet nothing at all.

And the empty spaces left behind,
name unsaid. I was young then;
true love, inaccurate eye.

Winter and the snow sparkling
in your hair,
eclipsing the streets reflected shine,
the lights in Christmas windows.

Biology is difficult to comprehend,
but I believed in you,
which was maybe something to worry about.

*

And still a girl in a photograph,
holding a child in her arms,
looking into the lens with a smile
she has learned to set before cameras
like an actress in a B-movie.

Every minute a measured touch winding
into the frame, a backward glance of unbidden depth.

I have passed these years squeezed of words,
now I think of her, as supple as ever.
finding fingers blue to the touch.
And we have journeyed, the road furrowed,
bare of grass, and littered with hungry mouths.

Words escaping into high cloud, drifting
like remote languages that no one hears.
Words scattered between us like seed;
all we need to make them grow.

*

It was as if an impediment of thought
exorcised all that awaited us,
unravelling the tangles,
our talisman against the senses
growing from pain into an impossible grace.

Un-haloed listener.
Who knows how boundaries were made,
yet I remember when syllables grew taut,
and in an afternoon’s shimmer of light,
the last of truth was killed.

I was never young again.
A Judas kiss, and I unburdened.
rehearsed ‘goodbyes' to an empty street.
The body was in need of more.

Examine your hands for stigmata.

You have stopped talking,
for sometimes you are unable
to bear the weight of words.
In this stillness, the disquieting
blur of detail; storm failing.
The web of your sleeplessness
trails across the distance
spreading like ripples in a pool,
I feel it in the dead of night.
when a body is more than need.

Time is all that is needed.

*

I wondered how anger had engaged
the moment, thinking how I might envy your
dissatisfaction with yourself.
your surfeit of dispensations.
the turning of heads, a concentration on
the impossible. It seemed like a score
for a tenacious autobiography
that I could not begin to comprehend.

*

I imagine myself as you looking at me,
you examine everyday scars and wonder,
re-invent another past, itself human;
everything in a new finery.

You smile your camera smile,
reproduce histories, brush the surface,
as afternoon turns to night,
night to day.
I mis-remembering the fine detail.

It was a cold Christmas that year,
even the chemical sludge on the canal
had frozen, everyone barricading
their mouths against the cold, and pneumonia
had taken Mrs Burns, gossip and door-knocker.

We used to baby-sit for your brother,
who had three tinsel angels on his mantelpiece.
His house was always cold.
You sat legs crossed on the sofa,
your skirt cautiously arranged;
white, angular, votive.
Shoes with heels too high.

I saw it all as a barometer
of your breath-taking depths
which guaranteed my lop-sided smiles,
a memorable circle closing
down the crazed world.
I recollect its stifle,
a number puzzle indifferent in its cruelty,
starlit neon streets that numbed
with their absurdity,
like rock circles which no one
understands or cares about,
or the mirrors of glass behind each eye,
ugliness and disorder,
the last refuge when all else fails.

It was like a gift bestowed
with crashing politeness on a friend
wishing nothing but to die a quiet death.
I floundered like a fish out of water,
was dazzled by light out of darkness,
guarded each word with unreasonable vigilance.

*

But we kept promises, made offerings
nothing could withstand.
And forgiving secrets,

Spring came with the sticky bud
of chestnut opening by your gate,
the wood inundated with bluebell,
yellow celandine flooding the waters edge.

I remember my chest buzzing,
a parenthesis inside your head,
and you retreating like the inevitable turn
of the high tide in a feared Spring.

An indulgence of small irritations.

You asked what had become
of words that made us happy or sad.
Your eyes asked different questions,
the answers taking too long
to spread between us.

As oil on water.

*

A thinning sun feathered my indifference,
a displaced sense of loyalty,
a mental landscape,
essentially human, infinitely remote.

So close your eyes and you may feel night
exhausting itself. It was almost a feast,
yet you never saw a drop
of my blood spilled in your
dream of warm places. Imagine it now,

killing that heavy silence that goes unseen,
yet poisons the tongue in its talk of providence.

There are no answers to questions never asked,
no recognition of gestures censored for fear of failure.
And how easily belief grows, how tenuous its hold on the truth.

*

Your photograph is squared for silence,
there is nothing to remind me of your voice.

After you left, nothing could explain
your voice thus contained,
a dismay which lit imagination.

We are each our own sedating pain,
over-ruled only by the crude arts of persuasion.
And we grow wise after events,
but we do not look back.

Others are gone too, along with their words,
I remember each of them leaving, walking softly
as a heart dissolved its composure
and denied the path to sleep, turned the night
into the wilful sound of sentence.