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

These days the project does not even
get delivered to one’s door in a flat pack;
all she receives is a dream thin pattern
like those tissue Vogues her mother used to use,
and every time she tries to lay it straight
the corners curl in the heat of the kitchen,
rip with the rush of children home from school.
She mends it with sellotape and folds it back
into a promise under her pillow, until late
at night when sleeplessness rises like wind
rank with flood warnings in the morse of blood.

The first thing to do is dismantle the house,
sift through the rubble for salvage.
The foundations already slide and subside
from the leak in the lies she discovered;
so she follows her nose and her sense of survival
down the webbed stairs to the cellar
to survey at last exactly what she has
and has not got to hold the home up.
There in the unaired pockets between the base
of her life and the rafters of done and undone
she sees the veined spread of white spores, channels
of fungus feeding the rot she ignored, and still
in the corner, her very own tender, buried under
years, is worth scraping clean with her fingernails.

It is just whole enough to cradle round spirals
of the way back up, and opening their bedroom
where he hides in his tossing sleep, she sees
the minute holes in the floor beneath the bed,
the little piles of dust beside them, the excrement
of invisible creatures she knows for the first time.
She collects the children’s voices, two by two,
climbs out of the window and scales to the roof
where she sits tight under the stars with what
is left of the tissue, the tender, the tears,
and she prays, and she prays, and she prays for rain.