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

I sit beside the angled bed, redundant
as the stiff bouquet of daffodils, browned
to the colour of tea-leaves, the blank
eye of the TV screen, the fields of neutered sunlight
just beyond these mud-grey walls.

Embarrassed, at a loss for words
as always when confronted with essentials
such as dying, I content myself
with waiting out her silences and nodding
encouragement when the eyelids twitch
and the hollow crow of her windpipe takes
the shapes of need and thought.

In the narrowing windows of breath
between seizures, she discourses on the flavour
of mangoes: how she’d pick them fresh
in Martinique, oval fruit soft as a breast
in her fingers, the slack flesh concealing a sweetness
so perfect her lips, drained to pallid magenta
from failing circulation, pucker as it thought of it
as she savours the ghost of sensation. Her teeth

after eighty years, are blunt
and worn as adzes. At twenty, though, she’d swim ahead
of the oyster-boat, holding a bow-line
in clenched jaws and towing
her husband past the coral reef,
the slack tide, the crumbling sea-wall,
glancing back across the swell of light
to glimpse him sitting upright -
his frock coat, his patriarchal whiskers -
great Moses on the fragrant flood
of memory, drifting out. Her body
is shutting down, the night nurse informs me.

I imagine the grid of her nerves going dark;
the hospital room folding into itself
one muddy beige petal at a time like origami
swans settling into the sweltering harbour;
the child in her muslin dress curled on the day-bed
in the Port-Au-Prince house, with its faint scent
of mangoes, sheltered at last
from the mad heat of being, the machinery
of pain and desire winding down,

all the energetic atoms of her body
whirling like flywheels and pulleys
backward toward the inertia,
the rest state that none of us comes from
but that each of us dreams in the end.