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

She was prepared to believe
The fraudulent label - it was her father’s violin.
But they said You must learn the piano
First. She crossed her fingers
In the name of Guarnerius. Guarnerius is in heaven.
No kin to the keyboard with its ready-made notes,
She reneged - they would impose
A kind of nunnery discipline.
She climbed instead the domestic Eiger face,
Doing the thousand things that have to be done.

Fly-bite hazel brush, violets,
A tang of chives in the rain
Jackdaw, she says, editor,
Individual by anthology …

Dispersed among the faculties, to sleep …

Crisp and glittering salt
Water proposes to the shore
Wave after leisurely wave.
The roads are quiet.

Turquoise oil refined to light. The waters of Torbay.
     In the sky you stand on neat tarmac. Observe

the ballet class, the hive of engineers, the midwives
     praying. What are your tears? Rain on your lips
     is nothing.

The footbridge swoops to a suburban street.

The window-pane bright as a healthy eye. The carpet
     cherry, tumescent.

Stoic wisdoms, creatures of chance, my mad professors.
     Oak.

Avenue towards night, horizontal winter sun, a bundle
     of floodlit limbs :

tour de force cast in interstices in the steely,
     brilliant air.

Obdurate foliage, crevices dreams. Environment
     determines consciousness.

An electronic wind animates the circuitry. Mutual
     dyspeptic critique, doting, sugar and gall.

The medium is uncertain each is neither side of the
     glass. If I were distinct I would feel it as -
     distinction.

Two sexy robots in a hall of mirrors processing ore.
     Past felicities are crushed to a seam, a dense
     mineral glitter.