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

The columns that moan at sunset, the litter
Of rinds and rags, the porticos
Swept by the desert wind, and the fleas like sand hopping;
The crumbling recesses and sidechapels, the altars
Stained with monkeypiss, and the concourse
Assembles to the seeing nose
Of the shoefaced temple-ape,
Like a garden growing into a god,
A being totted up
From generations of smell, the skittered pissed
Labyrinthine walkways drawn by the lightpencils
Set between the legs, and a formal garden
Of fleshlier flowers than we can grow.
The monkey in my roses
Is bored by them and lopes off to the stables.

These bones are littered only because
They are in the course of arrangement, they are passed
From hand to hand or piled at certain stations,
And as they pass are worn a little more
Turning to dust and air and the world’s smell,
Releasing the monkey-nature to join the sky.
These little mummifications are too rich,
Too informative to be swept away,
Each is closely-written with the scents
Of every minute of the life of an ancestor
Or wife, for this widower
Consults his bone, tastes it, and knows again
His deceased mate. I make a mask of bone
And peer through monkey-sockets,
I learn to see what I smell, the flies
Dotting the dung like crochets and the ghostly smells
Opulent as unwashed kings, sweeping by.
Smelling these bony fingers is reading
My father’s very private diary, gnawing this uncle
Is quoting from his family bible; but in this ossuary
There are too many ancestors waiting to be read,
We need more monkey-hands to do it, more returns.

We must condense from the great sky millions more.
So my mate stares away over the horizon
As the sphinxes gaze, while I
Inject more God into her bottom, so our litter
May run among that litter, reading it, and become
Litter, to be read. The moon in special
Excites all the spirit-recordings in the bone,
Now she is full and rises above our walls
And turns my dear’s eyes to dripping moons
As she watches me over her shoulder while
I do our business for us both
Calling down into her some of the spirits
Who drift among the richly-furnished library of bones.
Her breast heaves, it is done, they circulate
Within her lean fur. Tomorrow then
There will be an entirely fresh
Nursery of smell-flowers
Twining up the harmonic columns
Of these sunny, shadowy precincts, a nosery of our own.