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

One of his inheritances, the need for order:
things fixed, unchanging, bound by structure and routine.
So the week we dis- and re-assemble rooms
breaks his orientation to our world:
cries wrong way round in his bed all night,
screams the topsy turvy days away,
until, exhausted, we drag our hollow shells
into the constant hills.
We walk in no particular direction,
feeling the heal of our breathing
with the lift and fall of our boots
as he runs ahead to greet the known trees
(down to the ground, inside out) with ritual circular dance
until he is rooted, soothed by the certain wood.

Breaking through bracken to make for home
we find ourselves adrift at the wood’s edge -separated
from the small blue glint of car
by acres of whortleberry.
We strike out across the heath,
Dylan trilling and squealing at the moths
which fly up from deep blue berries
to flap around his head.
I bend among them, my face brushed
by the dusty wings of Lappet and Brindle,
to pinch the tips of leaves for fruits,
secrete them in my pocket.
As we approach the road, you crouch:
dig a clump of heather from the healing ground.

*

Later that week, sorting clothes for washing,
I will pluck from the basket my linen shorts
and find a Rorschach squash of whortleberry:
the stain chromatographic; amethyst circles
closing to a livid heart.
And I will remember the day’s petty theft:
how we sang along the burning road to find a glittery
mosaic laced across our children’s seats, the baby’s milk -the
glass crumbling like crushed ice around a jagging hole.