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

A red fog occupied both the cities and the hinterlands.

   After the collective memory of a time before the fog begins to miniaturize itself, turning into a key that slips from a parents pocket while playing with his child in the grass; after the wild grasping hands of beings unlike ourselves withdraw into the wood; after the absolute alarm of flesh succumbs to the infirmity of the mind in its failure to imagine flesh alight; after the alabaster alarm clock of the self began to ring and ring and ring - deep in what sleep, deep in what sleep? - or after the words have bedded down for the night; after the night unfurls over the empty headlands and the wind offers ultimatums to the exhausted sand: after the laughter of the ocean shakes the fulcrum of my being; after the rain cloud exhausts every drop of its discharge and exists only as kneeling puddles and slinking eddies sinking ever lower on the plain; then, a spiral motion.

   You believe in perceptions, in forms, in bodies, in perceptions of forms and bodies, but these are all maps, the perceptions, the bodies, the forms. You choose to look at them – the bodies and the forms – but there are no maps onto which to place what you see, no charts with which to freeze what you feel, no maps or charts to deploy in order to traverse or conquer this field. The word “map”, like the word “God”, a vile obscenity. This obscenity fills my work with spiral voids. A cat chases a red point of light shot from a pointer, a moving beam impossible to paw, impossible for pussy not to pursue: red beam projects red point, red beam traceable back to held pointer, a watch in the sand by the shore. Words are beamed without point. Thus she chose to remain wordless, would not utter a single sound. She spoke. Thus, a spiral motion. After the city had been abandoned and the dog had begun to bark, after the conversation with difference ended, the limp that came in and the imp that went out; after the gaps between “A” and “B” and between “C” and “D” failed to reveal any unsuspected images and sounds; after self-contemplation was reconfigured as elf immolation, the wellspring of pent-up waters left so pent, or allowed to rush as inexact vocabulary into an immovable glacier, tense with the effort that drives off what I intended to maintain by effort, relaxing and letting drop what I intended to preserve, doubting in the words I helped elicit in the other, the one I was speaking to and helping to speak and investing my own energy in the speech of. In other words: am I a man dreaming I’m a spiral motion, or a spiral motion dreaming I’m in dialogue? The heart-held camera only shows us what it wants to show us in any given beat.

   After the rabbit had been eaten and the cigar burned so low it refused to be relit; after switching one word with another word and watching them both burn up in their new locations; after the mind failed to fill in the space around it with an aesthetic of its own compulsion; after the words had become weighted with their worst associations, yet still were recognizable as what they had been before and thus did not become new words; after the furrows in the field were covered with frost; after the frost was speckled with some dark spore released by the action of the frost working upon the field; after a mouse, trembling, exited from his hole into the clear blue day: I spoke again into the whirling void.

   After the individual person had become a joke, after jokes became the innermost substance of persons, after the rain fell and dispersed the frost in cold eddies of water casting up mud and drowning the spores; after a wind rose up again and froze the outer scum of the pond and the rain that had fallen; after the electricity poles where the birds used to perch suddenly stood empty of both birds and wires; after a motorbike disturbed the dusk; after a knife pasted to a board of wood, covered with paint, suddenly flashed from inside the art work: the mind flashes, open to its own ground: the spiral motion empties itself again of all content -; after the stage collapses in the hilarity of its invention; after the geese fly shrieking through the barely intelligible sky and a potted plant is tipped over and dumps its soil on the always soggy carpet, one or two half-broken clods crumbling through a break in the screen, releasing one single crumb through the screen, into the outside world: the dead electricity poles fill with crows, the crows caw: she speaks into the spiral motion.

   I spoke into the whirling void. After the privilege of the infinite turned out to be finite; after the mission of reading is felled by televised idols; when an extra step away from the desert road means to lose the road forever; after negation is called into question by a viscous goo of image that accumulates on everything, even on nothingness, especially on nothingness, until nothingness is goo; after the geese flew through a departing patch of orange sunlight: the glimmer of nothingness catches your eye from inside the spiral: it is possible to move again, into a new space, because of the split: the woods echo and crash in the throes of the tremor: the plates and glasses, the silverware, slide from the table -; after their crash, a great silence; after the great silence, a potential leaf pile; after the leaf-pile has been assembled and played in, its every audible crinkle savored and memorized and productive of new language in the aftermath, one that does not contain in it a word for “death” with the slightest negative connotation; then comes a spiral motion.

   After amazed solitude solved its maze and became lonely, after golden eggs hatched into golden eaglets, after the sumptuous cradle grew too tiny to contain even the smallest of offspring, something smooth and pristine abandoning its own idea of itself for someone else’s idea of it and becoming lumpy; after the dazzle of being and the razzle-dazzle of non-being; after a wax cast was slipped over a feverish living form, after the form in its fever melted all the wax and emerged from the drippings, even more feverish than before, glistening, distorted, human; when the guard barked at the visitor, mistaking him for a prisoner, and the visitor drew further into the cluster of inmates, until the guard, who would remain in the prison on a longer bid than the visitor or any of the inmates, realized his mistake and utterly altered his tone of voice, the voice suddenly the kind one human offers to another, the willed change of which was more horrific in its implications than the original snarl; after the ping-pong table, set outdoors, warps beyond the hope of predictable bounce and abandons all hope of garnering attention, beading with moss the color of its own paint, its aluminum legs buckling in submission to its pariah status; after the spongy terrain of syntax and forest floor becomes its own raison d’etre, dotted with barely perceptible trails along which the postman must walk if he wants to deliver the unretractable message; when the obscene word, shorn of any other way of being uttered except as an obscenity, or of being sent, except as an obscenity, sickens, gets ready to be said but then grows silent: for words on their own can never weep: the web is filled with living flies: long-forgotten wrecks tremble in their undersea graves, as if suddenly, in spite of all, they had expectations: the fish, swimming in spiraling schools around the ruined hulk, are agitated too, as if anticipating a sudden change: no wind, but all the pines along the shore-line bend slightly towards the bay: the reader tosses aside his book and walks away before anything happens, because nothing ever seems to really happen: the captain jettisons half-filled barrels in anticipation of a storm: the wanderer jettisons his rucksack and decides to stay put, where he has come. Of these three only the wanderer finds he must recant. He picks up his rucksack, spirals away.

   There is no map. It is either a beach or a desert the wanderer traverses, or both at once. After the plovers nest has been raided and the plovers eggs have been eaten, after the walking dunes have buried the wanderers footprints and the tiny broken egg shells; after the wanderer has gone many miles along this strip of land either coastal or arid or perhaps both at once; after his wandering has become increasingly aimless and desperate: - every living being desires to wander and change, but this particular wanderer is already dead, having lost his argument with his lungs, recanted everything his heart has pumped, or so he feels as he wanders -; the ice-cube machine avalanches its creations into the bucket, the bucket is carried excitedly along the corridor back to the motel room, the cubes are dumped right away into the sink: - immediately upon coming to rest in the sink the ice begins to imperceptibly shift, those with ears discern a slight trickle of movement as beads of water begin to melt, to escape: - so the wanderer resting on his back in the soft sand feels his being indiscernibly trickle into the beach, or was it a desert, a ditch in the epistemic ground, grain upon grain of unique matter stamped to the outline of his body; after he had slept in that position for what seemed to him like an eternity; after he had wondered how such a sleep was possible, to descend to such depths and to be able to emerge from such depths, until he realized he was awake; after a brown regulation football was swept in by the waves and he realized that yes, here was the ocean, therefore this was definitely a beach, only possibly a desert; after the placebo of words had worn off, which is to say nothing had worn off because placebos never wear off, never having had an effect; after gathering himself up to watch the sun rise as if by some supreme effort of the will on the part of both the wanderer and the sun; after adjusting his black eye patch and tugging on his floppy black cap:- the sun rises over the sea:- men clamor for meaning, women clamor for freedom, children clamor for chump change:- in the gathering light, one of each lay in the hammock and shared a drink, passing the glass back and forth amongst themselves with some care: look, here come cows and horses being herded down the beach, or a spiral motion of sealed instructions, or a domestic camel mistaken for a wild camel: as if it was you was who was writing into this spiral void, the camel really wild and this a desert after all.