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

It must have been a month ago
I loved you, and I told you so;
And I remember, clear as day,
How our steps rang along the way,
Crisp as a legion's; and soon
The ghostly west, the ochre moon.
We turned our backs upon the west,
And came downhill what way seemed best,
By lanes and fields; the gate; and stars;
And dim, contented motor-cars. . .

Those were the days; and now those days are over—
Days when I was so glad to be your lover
That I could go up to your room and stay,
Happy as God, although you were away,
Because it was your own familiar place;
So happy if I met you face to face
That the world stood at arm's length, and I knew
Nothing but you, nothing but only you,
And was no poorer, knowing you, no more
Days when I did not stop to think, to pore
Curiously on the workings of your mind;
Days of the unreflective, unconfined,
Innocent egoism, confident
And unafraid to say just what it meant,
Or needed not to say, because it felt;
Days when I was so humble that I knelt
Perpetually at the altar rails
Of your communion. (How the light fails—
The light, or else the eyes of your gay lover.)
Those days are over, over.

The lyrical days close,
Wherein I loved nor reasoned.
Now's the time for honest prose,
Sensible, seasoned,
That thinks, that comprehends
When lovers become friends:
Prose that plays a harder part
Than the fresh lyric of the heart;
Prose, I say, the nobler art.

Think not that I love no more;
I love you better than before,
Yes, better; only otherwise.
The light comes back into the skies,
(The light that had been yours alone)
Colour comes back to tree and street and stone:
The world goes on; the world's the world again,
And men are only men.
You are come into reach; I take your hand,
And the mere touch no longer mends.
If I love still, then I must understand,
And lovers, to be lovers, must be friends.

For I have lost that love uncritical
That was my medicine when you were all:
Now I must come to know you through and through,
Now that all's mine again, and all's still you.
I love: I must have reason for my love;
And what I know for true, yet must I prove
To my own satisfaction; must be sure
That I have followed no unworthy lure.
(Do I suspect it? Never.) And if I knew
(Of course I know) why should I trouble you?
Why should I hang upon you, cumbering
Your soul's flow, clogging, baulking everything,
A clumsy groper, pawing at your mind,
An ingrate Bartimaeus, only blind
Because he is so sure you will be kind. . . ?

Let me go. My thanks
For all you did for me.
Blindfold me for the pirate-planks
That lead from the devil of my egoism
To the abysm
Of an oblivious sea:
And all this damned parade of eye, tongue, lips,
Be whelmed in a quick, merciful, eclipse.

Blindfold. No, but I must see where I go:
Not that it matters whither—the immense
Will easily receive me—only whence,
For, maybe, if I know
That you are somewhere by, and watching me,
I can still trust your magnanimity. . .

They say that men awaiting surgery
Of an uncertain issue, find new zest
In trivialities that please them best:
The senses are all quickened; their delight
Buds freshly on the trees of sound and sight:
And life, so fallen into disrepair,
Becomes again astonishingly fair.

And so I thought to leave you? Well, I never!
Drastic, but not particularly clever.
The very thought put me in mind of you:
Until I thought of it, I never knew
How little I could mean it. Now I know
That it would need your word to make me go,
(Your word, no more, no less.)
And I am happy again. Under the stress,
My joy in you broke out in eager bloom,
My joy in you dispels the passionate gloom;
Under a keen spring sky
We'll stride league-booted over a world glowing
With life and loveliness and love of growing;
And I shall see you, and amusedly
Think what a fool I was to think of going.