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

I.

In memory of St Ives
      the pluvial air dances
            against supernatural grass
like hints in an unfinished pain-
ting.                       sun glints, &
      a tiny bell trips in the mind
      tightening the chains of recollection.

From dazzling house fronts
where blossoms tumble from old boots
full of the fragrance of half-remembered walks
light diverts
            from the tide of all
            that washes back the emotions
            of that belated holiday
            piquant on the rim of middle-age.

‘More moon than honey, now,’ I quip,
gazing into the cool disc. You respond slowly
                                          with a dry smile.

On our last evening, rain
drying in the narrow gulleys,
a great humidity settled
                              a solemnity.

As we prepared to turn back
into the stream of our lives
as that tide turned, full
of magnetic sadness on the poignant pivot
of our time, I tossed the flower
we’d been entranced by
into the darkening waters.

We knew it couldn’t survive
the journey back, wouldn’t re-root
in our ongoing lives at home.

But everything contracted around
its sudden frail symbolism, - the way
it kept coming back towards us,
a little further out each tine,
heartbreaking in its fragility
adrift in that heaving mass.

Rose, curled, & was gone
like all we might be losing
as we stepped back
            into the plot.

II.

Our skinny cat back home
wove a retaining spell around the journey -
scented clutter of our baggage.

Already rehearsing abandonment
he had the look of one of the disappeared:
a documentary reproof to stir our guilt.
Soon to be unfathomably gone, already
he adopted the pose of the Wanted poster
we’d place in the newsagents window.

A ring of fleas was clamped
to the rim of his ears, parasitic
slipped haloes of self-neglect. For how long
had those ears been cocked
for the sounds of our return?

Gingerly, one by one, I picked the fleas
& drowned them in his dusty saucer of milk
where they gathered in lifeless patterns,
clogged in dark canals. Then watched him
ablute contentedly
in feline yogic postures.

III.

After the grave holiday of loss -
after whatever parenthesis -
we soon sink back
into the old routine
the house gathers about us
rising & falling on interior tides
of energy & fatigue. I try again
my outline against old poets,
slip in & out of shadows,
                              silhouettes.

Yeats struggled to rise
each day. Eliot had to learn
to winnow a little energy
from much exhaustion. How
does one find the strength
to make the one small step
back to where we were,
                              moon-struck?