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

1.

Sometimes when you look up on a bright day,
the clouds have drawn apart, exposing a blue
that, for a moment, you can almost look through.
You’re surveying a stage long after the play
has finished. Above you, Tiepolo
presents a weightless mass of gods and legs
in endless apotheosis, delicate as eggs
in a cup, or naked skin in an afterglow
when legs and arms float off into half-sleep
and breasts settle warmly against the ribcage
slipping vaguely down its slopes, while the flat
lower belly shimmers and fingers keep
curling and uncurling like an open page
in a slight breeze. But you can imagine that.


2.

So you imagine it – although this is
the soft sell version, somewhere beyond which
the world is singing at a sharper pitch,
its shrieks full of glass, crowded with casualties:
men in ridiculous wigs, women with waists
pinched to a tight ring, thin children in beds
with soiled sheets, the poor with their shaved heads
and hollow eyes, cruel sexual gymnasts
one step from madness, new forms of rough trade,
a puritan hell which no amount of light
can keep from sinking deeper into flames.
Imagine it. And through that? The betrayed
clear blue of something very simple, as trite
as touch, the sound of the most common names.


3.

You listen to them. It’s no different there
next door, next year. The sky is lightly cracking.
An enormous gentleness billows its wing
and you too are up aloft, somewhere in the air
on an internal flight, your safety belt
clipped shut, with a glass of whisky on the rocks
on a swivelling tray, among lazy flocks
of clouds that snuggle up to you then melt,
substantial as any god or human life.
Now you’re a god. There’s something piercing and sad
about this knowledge, as if there were nothing but
that rococo blue which beggars all belief,
the world below disordered, a ragged, mad
arena of blood which runs and refuses to clot.


4.

In this particular Tiepolo,
The Finding of Moses, where a Venetian
beauty, dressed in the height of contemporary fashion,
stands in for the daughter of the Pharaoh,
your eyes discover a female figure, vast
thighed yet slender and long, with cheekbones sleek
as a greyhound and eyes that plead to speak
a mind so powerful it makes your own fly fast.
The even blue sky above her seems to spring
straight from her gaze which comprehends your own.
It solves the world, bandages its wounds,
ties up its severed limbs with blood-soaked string,
walks the streets of explosions up and down,
and smiles at all its terrible, sad sounds.


5.

Keep flying, pilot, We’re gods of air and fire,
our clay feet stuck in loam. Bring me a drink
and let me watch the clouds move as I think
of something clear as glass in the empire
of the bladed, whose agents are generous.
I’m fed up of this Rococo court, that sits
tremendous-arsed, and will shortly be blown to bits
on its mountain-top five-star hotel terrace.
It’s dark outside. Soon the movies come on
with hollow icons and interminable chases.
I want a woman of luminous intelligence to heal
my hypochondria. Soon we shall land on the sun
with smooth, unruffled, tanned, innocent faces,
staring at endless blue. It’s no big deal.