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

21.

In all this far expanse of sky I hereby write
                                                       for you,
horizon to dusty blue horizon arching,
(a few blown clouds, like blouses
on a line)

If there is no dove in flight,
then there is no room,
of course, to fit one.

A grubbing half-grown
Gloucester Black Spot sow, yes.
In some corner.
Caterpillars winding on a nettle
their curious squelchy question-marks.
OK, a few.

This is how poetry makes us.
Unreasonable. Petty.
Empathic about, well, nonsense.
Personable in nothing at all.

Example: our smiles
are bad fits,
always.
However much
we use and use them,
pull them this way and that,
they will not hide
the daft cartography
the years have scribbled over us.

I’ll own up.
Poetry has been like a beating
from the maths master,
47 years ago, and not forgot.

I’ve stood myself
upon the vigorous lunacy
of my pals
and watched, in mirrors,
how, along with them,
I laughed and fell.

A lie, of course.
A damned lie, nearly.
What I mean is,
that’s a little how it feels,
to be lost,
to be groping in the dark,
with only language,
poorly marshalled,
for a light.

I jest at times,
but that’s how it feels.

I found, in The Hound of Heaven,
that Francis Thompson, even he,
was similarly beset. Listen.

Heaven and I, listen to him.
Heaven and I wept together,
and its sweet tears
were salt with mortal mine.
Against the red throb
of its sunset-heart
I laid my own to beat,
and share commingling heat.

But not by that, by that,
was eased my human smart.
In vain my tears were wet
on Heaven ‘s grey cheek.
For ah! we know not what
each other says, these things and I.
In sound I speak...
they speak by silences.

I grimly smile,
to know my little touch
of the great man’s
lonesome melancholy.
Yea, falleth now even dream
the dreamer, and the lute the lutenist.

Out of dawn’s glooming robes
of shaken mist,
a thirty-eight ton Scania
rumbles,
glinting, majestic.
Bringing Valencia oranges,
Santa Rosa plums
and bright red Dutch tomatoes
to my sighful seaside town.
Eighteen wheels,
the mudflaps dripping.

An odd thing, isn’t it,
to be, at once,
beset and blessed.
Sensation Rag was a tune
of Benny Goodman’s.

A dotty chemist, with too many teeth,
leans intently over his retort,
noting, on our behalf, the checks
and balances that keep us
keep keeping on.

He was in Ankara, 1797.
In Salisbury, Rhodesia, 1941.
He could be in your town, today.
Waving at you kindly,
from a high half-open window.
Mr. Wu.
Don’t shut him out. Wave back.
In your lunch-hour, sustain him
with your warm, uplifted grin.

One O’Clock Jump.
That’s another one
Benny Goodman did.

22.

And O he/ drives the business Mercedes
carefully onto the Sailing Club gravel.
His boat, one in a row against the back fence.
Shaped creamy hulls, all with blue canvas
rain-covers pulled across them tight.

He’s doing OK.
The leather that cradles him confirms it.
The car phone.
The navigator’s certificate folded in his
                                                    wallet.

He speaks the language of himself.
It carries him.

All right, I agree.
The dash of humour suits.
Saves, I could even say.

And ah she’s/ home at the picture window,
with black Douwe Egberts coffee
unsweetened in a scarlet mug,
watching the gulls arc.
She doesn’t know it,
but her thighs do for her
as wings do for the birds.

But she knows it really,
as she turns to her laundered sheets,
a folded pile on the pine dining-table,
Dutch coffee and clean sheets
capture her like adventure.

All she needs, soon please,
is a chocolate-brown Volkswagen Golf
GTI convertible.
Music.

Personally, I don’t think they
do that colour any more.
She might have to buy used.
Signal red, surely, would get it done.
Or black, with a stripe.

(She opens a window.
An autumn rose breathes on her).

The lunatic’s pineapple could not be found
in her kitchen.
Though we can never be certain, no.
In the dark of her glance is a world
her husband’s cash would turn to dust in.

She’s cried, of course. Women have.
She speaks another language women know.
We can let her go from the poem.
Fine with me.
Her even teeth will bite into pears,
forever without us.

In the end, it’ll be her Chris Rea tapes
that’ll know most about how things
pan out for her.

Ska. And the blue beat hat.
1964, on the Holloway Road.
Jesus.

23.

Rise from my pad, pen and stone.
The poor dog restless,
snout poking my thigh.
With a nudge, he tells me.
Walking can do what sitting does
better than sitting can.
And, hey, that pen could be
getting you in trouble.
He’s ready to head to where
I can see woods
wade at the water’s edge.

White bones of baby crabs
like lacework along the tide-line.
Ghosts. That fall to pieces,
if you try to take them
in your hand.

I can circumambulate, in deep thought,
or restful thoughtlessness, all I want.
But from here, the poem goes beyond me.
I can feel it starting.
It knows elusive sky and ancient earth
better than I ever will.
Knows what the meanings are
of waters still and blue
and the dark shapes deep
that coolly and dangerously
turn down there.

But I don’t much care.
I need no poem to work my feet
back home to icon coffee, icon toast
and conversation.
The french windows thrown open,
so a lavender bush can listen in
on what we say,
Sancia, Paget and I.

Mowlem, the dog?
Sniffs his bowl.
Heads for his blanket,
to await developments.

I spoil, some more,
these tired pages,
with witless language.
Surrendering brevity,
the poem’s strength,
for breadth and my own
silly fun.
Struggling for the first
10,000-syllable haiku.

24. (this for Andy)

Amongst other meaningless
endeavors real men
(being boys) engage in,
they climb mountains.

They dye their hair long,
use grandma’s legacy
to lower a VW split-screen van,
respray it.
Peel a Headworx sticker
onto the rear window.
Slide in a board
and go surfing the tarmac.
Or they climb mountains.

They disappear into caves,
with loops of rope
and a torch on their hats.
They stand astride jetski steeds
that bronco, with a wild racket,
on the slapping brine.
Or they climb mountains.

They fall backwards
in rubber suits
off rubber boats
in search of seaweed.
Or they climb mountains.

They get lager in them.
Break noses.
Drive Astras with a furious disregard
for the rule of consequence.
Or, like me, they climb mountains.

Today, as many days,
I set off after breakfast.
Alone. Into the foothills.
The wine-glasses, cutlery and coffee-cups.

On up past the timber-line.
Plates glued with curry sauce.
(We had guests)
(a new skill with Indian foods
was exercised)
Pyrex serving-bowls. A sticky jug.
I plunge my hands
into the sudsy water.

Fearless, gulping thin air
I advance on the peaks,
where many turn back.
The saucepans. The saucepans.

My God, they hang on
to their burned bits.
They fight me.
But I fight them.

At last, it is done.
And done well.
The lot.
All dried, stacked and stashed.

Back home, in my chair
the washing-up mountaineer
can surely boast.
The kitchen is neat, neat.
Go look.
The plants, comfortable on the sill,
gaze soulfully out at the scudding
autumn wind.

Oh, yes.
Yes, yes.
Yes, indeed.

25.

Zen bones. Not today. But thanks.
Some other time, the raked sand,
the toasted seaweed.

A Tex-Mex accordion.
Ya talkin.
It’s midnight on the dot,
give or take an hour or two.
The player’s holding something
on his lap that breathes adios.
He picks out heartbreak
on the buttons.

There is moonlight,
that hides what it reveals.
Moonlight in the words of the song,
is what I mean.
Home’s no easy place to find.
Something in the back
of a pick-up outside Amarillo
rattles in Spanish.

Helplessness.
That’s what we share,
as goodbyes cry for us.
Helplessness poured through
with nervous melancholy.

And music is a bell
that calls us almost
clear of it.
I think of Alfred Deller
singing Fairest Isle.

Ryoanji is music, too.
You couldn’t doubt.
One thing by day.
Another by starlight,
when cooler shadows
are feeding at the stones.

And Issa. Ah, Issa.
He’s made haiku
that could resolve pain.
Were we to look into them,
as into mirrors.

26.

A man behind a new brick wall,
sawing furiously through a log.
Getting the winter ready, I suppose.

The things. Pause. That capture us.
A dove’s coo.
A jingle of small coins in the palm.
The Mark 3 Ford Zodiac,
painted Old English White.

A mystery.
How we live so far.
And reach so little.
Lucky a little’s all we need, as I said.

Mystery. Pause again.
Is a hunter by the moon.
Two green eyes glittering through twigs.
Muscled shade creeping.
Something to watch out for.

But also.
It’s bright as cornflakes.
Simple as a newsagent’s door.
Almost, what hereafters
have ever promised us.
Something to watch for,
when, like today,
light opens on light.

When, in tussocks of salt-rimed grass,
tiny dead crabs turn millimetres of living
                                                           truth
into lacework you can’t take back
in the car.