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

A wind gets up, drops,
pluming shelterbelts apart,
herding fields and ridges
in a circling roll
so that they lap and bunch
against the village limits.

The roads are restful and forgetful,
drive a clean kilometre
then dribble themselves
into shrubbed lanes, with momentary housebacks
and caught heat
still breathing from the afternoon.

Now a church cries up
its bleached innards
on a far-off coast,
ringing down the sun

and we walk out,
setting free the talk and signs
and traffic of the day,
the minute of rain outside Skibby,
the girth of the man
who disbelieved our map
and flung a hand eastwards--
all of it rises behind us,
loops the long trees
that shake birdcall and green
onto the inn’s tiling.

We take a muscle of a road
braided with low gardens and a bike shop.
A stoplight, minutes long,
dares asphalt and runs of picket
not to turn as fiercely red.
It chases and spills
like some far and future moon
on static water.

Ahead, an engine sharpens out of
the country dark. The car
disengages under the red,
humming soft, glass and finish
sealed with a talk station’s chuckle.

The light changes
and we are left
with the surf of near-quiet
and a sign: Fjaltring Alle:
last road in the village--
end-on houses fall away
to sleep in mounded vales;
a swept path serves each gate.
Paving stones wear simple contours,
drop as grey waves
from sign to bottom road.

Might as well:
We’ve had the rest beneath our feet.
Turning back would blemish
our passing ownership
like pinheads of light,
unaccountable on the last roll.

As we descend,
another sound chamfers
at the first minutes of real night.
Someone’s head melts
from the leftward vales.
Pathlight splashes handlebars,
gives a young face an unswerving stare;

now he cuts forward
to Fjaltring Alle.
The metal bellies comfortable
round him: an old Vespa,
could almost be, with no regrets
for running on threads of space
in jockeyed traffic,
for skidpan winters
and gravity leaking off the trim
to crust the footboard.

He wants no faster:
the machine has a care
for the stopped life in his legs,
his feet, and brings him sureness
like a warm rain he once leapt in
at summer’s edge, perhaps.

He rocks down
to the bottom road,
the road we drove in on;
his light snouts what we don’t see
a second ahead of him--
as he tacks in short twists,
snicking out his way;

where the kerb dips,
he crosses, spots us
where we have nearly stopped,
stupidly scared to flaunt our walking:
‘Dav,’ he calls, ‘hej-hej,’
and something else.
Down he flows with the paving,
wind not in his hair,
face not chapping up--
makes a right towards our inn,
rounds done, village settled.

When we reach the road
he’s gone. But there are drives
everywhere, fleeting behind trees,
fetching up at swept yards
and deep-stained steps;

perhaps, even now,
hands are lifting him clear
into the last drift of heat;
a voice is speaking
of a hot mug on the kitchen table
or chiding that he was such a time
at his duty;
and he is countering
that he rode below two strangers,
ruled his purpose across their evening
and rang it down with
‘hallo’, ‘goodbye’ and the something else:
‘safe home,’ maybe,
‘sound the earth with your footsteps--
race, if that’s your fancy.’