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

The house anticipates you, its memory
bringing it from blown mist at the lane-end
where litter is caught on a hedge
and your father’s car rages into rust.

Approach by apple trees where spiders
have webbed branches with a morning’s
fine brocade of pearls; they part for you,
an avenue of veiled, expectant brides.

First sparrows' hunger under dawn’s uncrumpled
sheets of silk; expect no stirrings
from the house, though one light left on
still signals from a room of books.

An hour’s wait. Quotidian things amaze:
the radio’s blurred tongue, the scent of
burning toast, the swish of curtain rings,
your father’s voice the same.

Your mother rises to her children’s milk-
teeth smiles, shrugs into a damson
dressing gown - that Christmas gift - clearing
her hair from its collar, careless as a girl.

Here is the house: its spare-room duvet
folded back, its cupboard of broken toys
bicycles outgrown in the garden shed, a
half-built glider hanging in the attic room.

Lives resume, grow back towards themselves
the way house-plants grope for light; now
rays delineate the lawn, dowse a gutter, gild
the door knocker where your hand tries

to rap an entrance but falls away instead.
This house with coffee cups, its blue fume
of iris in a vase, its hush of order. The way they
rush to the phone, catching a child’s voice

in the man’s, anxious for everything in lives
that have rushed past theirs. Go in. This is your
room, re-arranging its furniture over plain rugs,
hanging old pictures on new-painted walls.

Go in take your mother’s tears, your father’s
paper hand, their questions abbreviating a
journey of lost years to this moment in a place
you need to stay but can’t, and cannot need.

Sweat awake at night, grope for a glass
where the fridge hums incantations of ice,
where thoughts melt to a water-stain map
of somewhere else you’d like to be.

In the morning, mist clamps the trees again,
your mother steams creases from a blouse,
your father whistles from the garden, tending
a fire of leaves which hardly yet begin to fall.

This house where nothing happens now,
freighted with forgiveness. This house of
open doors, and broken bread. This house
where you must wake and learn to breathe again.