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

“Ann, Ann, are you coming
Up the troubled blue road ?”

Across the smudged gravel she went, in her pointed best shoes, towards the crumbly castle. Inside there was a man who had lost his name, so desperately sunk in wickedness he was. Some now called him Break-All. Across the gravel she went in her pointed best shoes.

She encountered him in one of his thin corridors.

     “Terror munches terror,” he said.

     “An uncle a fly” he said.

Her gold face burned like a syllable.

She sat down on the sofa, arranging her wide pleated skirt around her, and looked to where the mirror kept changing. One minute it roared like the sea, next minute the leaves of glass lay still, like leaves
of lillies. She looked and he looked and she looked. Her arms rose
like branches, without her even intending them to, and she began to
arrange her long hair on top of her head.

She was starting to leave words out. Sharp as a whisper. Her words in the shrubbery were nasty as glass. The gravel spoke to the gate and the gate leaned and listened.

It was when she was not there that things really began to happen. The names left their walls with a soft plop, like suction pads being withdrawn from a smooth surface. Break-All grinned then. He scooped up a handful of names and stuffed them into a jug. His arms rippled like wheat on a hillside.

It was noon. The trees went all dark inside. Elsewhere the scone was too bright to be described. In the Belvedere Break-All rested his  head on a cushion. Ann lay on her back in the boat, transfixed by the sun.

     The house hung between inverted commas like two pairs of little
bushes.

It all looked as trim as a postcard.

She rotated very slowly on the spoke of the sun.

Break-All and his cousin Break-Neck, their hands blunt with ink and
experience, moved across the gravel. It was dawn. Her body lay in a
bedroom upstairs. The nurses bending over her were trying to reduce the terrible parched fever.

Stone rustled and began to whisper slyly. Hourly the crack got bigger.

     She came into the loft. A cloud came in through the open roof,
there were stars among the cameras.

     Places fled from the map. The sky creaked like a wheel over her
bed. She began to weep, hidden at the root of herself.

To cry out ! To cry out !

When she woke the sky was covered with erasures. She began to sculpt forms out of the dead matter, brushing away the flesh. Trays appeared, like hardened clouds, with little pots on them, and she was applying the paints and creams. Her pale face began to be flooded with blood. Everywhere she was seeking the names.