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

Old Prosser smoked Lloyd’s ‘Bondman’ mix;
I remember opening the round tin, then
its ruff of white paper, to inhale

the pent fragrance - richer than tar’s,
addictive as the blue glass jar of Vick
you could smell even through sore nostrils.

The empty tins stacked up in his shed
like money in the bank, it seemed to me
who craved them ‘to keep things in’.

Otherwise he seemed to have just one
of everything: pipe; the torn, hairy jacket
to pocket it (with the hairy string);

the single match he always somehow
found there too. All year he kept on
his stained grey pullover and segged boots

(though sometimes in summer
he wore fray-toed plimsolls with a new,
light-footed diffidence). He’d taken off

that cap so little it was black
with sebum, left a rim-mark in his hair.
He rode his ramshackle Rudge

everywhere on one soft tyre, a slatted
wooden box on the carrier with
a coal-shovel in it, for horse-droppings;

he even mooched fishheads and tails
from the weekly fish-van
to throw in the trench

for his runner beans; and my father said
Old Prosser was the best bloody gardener
in the allotments.

At 80 he still toddled the lanes on his bike
straightbacked till, stood at the kerbside
on one pedal, it was backed over

by a turning coal-lorry. At 83 he had his bed
brought down one cold November
to the room with the Rayburn,

and stayed there in a squalor
gradually almost medieval, the rest
of the house icy, unvisited.

He told slow stories from his youth
as an estate gardener’s son in Somerset
or, more rarely, the War - the ‘14 War -

and when he leaned at the window
unshaven, raw-eyed, winter-pale,
I think now that he was staring

out at a great cornfield felled row after
row, side after side by the pair-drawn
cutter till it was a solid block of gold

in the still heat of August, and
the rabbits, hares and pheasant, woodcock
and mallard and snipe, their colours

heaped, and the fourteen foxes,
seven peregrine, countless
buzzards and the winter stoat

with the black-tipped brush
he’d shot, and the boy
in the German uniform, were all

shrinking together in the standing square,
timid-eyed with forgiveness
and waiting for him there.