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

               A single drop falls from the center of the ceiling --
A ceiling through which with the slightest hint of support he could burst -

another city kid, wouldn’t know a shoot if it was coming out of the seed, wouldn’t recognize the seed and would think the little white curl of sprout looked like a leech or a baby slug; maybe he wouldn’t think it was lice or a maggot but these are what would cone to mind, he would pass the sprout with nothing more than those vague impressions, never giving it another.

he’s coming out of the bathroom, the door is open and a single drop from somewhere around the middle of the tin ceiling in the kitchen falls, he sees it just left of the center in the door frame: the white speck falls six inches and disappears -- then he realizes it fell in the kitchen and his perception has fooled him, stands still a second and smiles for the neat trick; is enticed...

enticement is a trick of movement but when he sees a seed-shoot he thinks of maggots... he walks into the kitchen not completely content with the trick as it stands, wants to poke the corpse with a stick except there s no corpse; later on, on the couch, he imagines the drop splattering, imagines it big, pictures it hit and the crown of its impact, twelve lines of water stretching the ball .of their head into reverse with fine line trails of water; the crown of impact; give me your dreams --

and low and behold, when he finally sleeps that night around 3 AM he sees daylight -- just as he closes his eyes it bursts upon him, shattering white, the white of arc welders multiplied into infinite space -- he can see nothing, takes a step forward and there is another such doorway, a darkened frame which is not part of the light, the sound of a single bird (as we tend to pick the same things of f our bodies over and over) -

the emptier a room is, the harder is its sound, the more sounds echo; such is not the sound of light, this birdsong does not echo in the well…

light in some way reverberates, differently: light pulses flesh and tone; the light suddenly feels like the interior walls of the bird as she sings, he passes through the doorway and it stops, there is a clap in the space before him, the light follows it out into one tiny spot on the cracked vinyl-tiled floor of his kitchen.

The light is gone, the bird is gone and the walls are hard; the room is empty with open windows, an empty room with open windows and hard walls that slap around the hollow shell of every sound that enters, ricochets, empty and chaotic, plays keep away with the sound of every sound that is lured into its openness: such are empty rooms --

The light, the light he thinks...the light made the sound come to life, the light gave flesh and tone; the light he murmurs, closing his eyes against the daylight, 5 AM sun pouring gold into his bedroom and onto him, the city kid…

-- Sometimes a bone is flung from the table ----