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

Voice cane-taps in at empty ear,
Takes soundings, estimates the loss
Of memory, recedes across
The fading galleries of bone
To silences like brimming tanks
In reservoirs down corridors
Where life lives on, alert alone
Among the rooms. Give me your hand.
The grids of grief are choked with light.
In light like this, a difficult
Perturbed light where I understand
Myself, the circuitry of lust
Is legible, and legible
The slow mould of mortality
On surfaces of suffering
And distance like discoloured glass
Where drifting cliffs of cloud are sheer
Improbables of turbulence
And stasis, arguments of dust
And air unwinding far away
On outskirts of reality,
A poppy-seed, a paper bag,
My father’s head, a cardboard flag
Adrift on surfaces of sleep.

Though grammar grips, it cannot keep
Perceptible the difficult
Geography of suffering.
Unfolding words are swept away
In blizzard silences, like steep
Ascensions of a dream, like mist
Rising from ice. Behind my chair
Is memory. A trailing cloak
Of perfume falls where nylon thighs
Are audible, old angelus
Reverberating in the blood
Like swarms of rust from shadow-thighs
Of mimesis, a glistered swish
Of summoning to stairs of smoke
Where mirrored glances brush and meet
In bargaining. And if I turn
Toward the porch of turf, the door
Of ragged earth, I recognise
My own condition going in
Of innocence, its vehemence
Like light on hidden film to scorch
Memory, forgotten figures
Slowly turning out of curling
Silence toward me as I turn.