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

You stand there on the far bank of a river
in a canyon flooded with new rain.
The seething chatters right up to your feet
but you stay unconcerned, just standing there
unwilling to plunge in or walk away.
Almost as if you’d posed before a mirror
you bend into the air so that the light
curves round you like the fingers of a potter
moulding the only vase he’ll never sell.
Your face, a blend of Florence and Siena,
is creamed with thought; a fire burning quietly
through eternal fuel of passion I seem
to see where darkness screens your eyes, and where
your mouth floats in its pool of shade lie sounds
too resonant to be dispersed in air.
I watch you on the other side of panic
in a dream of aspic standing there.

A noise one can’t define or afterwards
recall lives in the stream whose shapeless waves
forever leap but never move. Beside it
stands your stillness swelling till it fills
the canyon with a throb that drowns all sounds
and movements. Unlistening, unwatchful, busy
with little cares or splashing jokes, they don’t
detect the competition. They observe
only a hundred lost or cast-off things
that bounce downstream in the excited current
whose belly rumbles and whose thousand mouths
eruct about their undigested fears.
All I observe beyond the bubbles and
life’s fragments is the distant bank, solid,
impregnable, and on it you, no hair
or feeling out of place, perfection in
your inactivity, just standing there.

Perhaps it’s better we should be divided
and never meet, so I can always hold
an image in my mind of still perfection.
For if we met, a moulding of elastic
or touch of toiletries might catch my gaze.
Your eyes might show the glint of steel or plastic,
your mouth loom up in petulance and paint.
You might exude the smell of blood or seek
to hide it in cheap scent, and feel the need
to speak, if only from politeness. How
dreadful if you spoke gorblimey or - worse -
nattered, staining the stream with fag-ends of
your mind. Perhaps I should be grateful to
the river holding us apart. Too often
have I blinked through rivulets at looming
disillusion. I promise not to swim
across if you’ll continue standing there.