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

6

I dreamed that the Fine Feathers dress shop had moved from Hampton Street to an underground car park. A front room shop where smart good as new dresses for older women, like my mother, are occasionally exchanged. He follows rivers, as much as possible, making up his own path: a surveyor who has lived in Bridgewater all his life, five yards from the house he was born in. He has always counted himself lucky, and he knows the trig point exactly in metres rather than feet. It may already be privatised. There is no need to turn over the map. It has to be better to live in one place and he seems calmer now, telling me that the female frog is huge and hangs full length, belly engorged and red. Gorse in flower and the stems are still across the path, and my movement of them was not metaphysical. I certainly didn’t think hard about it. She has news of bullying at the middle school, and how the two girls can’t go there anymore, and who is back in hospital with his back to be reconstructed. Reports show that service users do not want local home helps as too much will be known about them. This is another reason to leave the pronouns vague. You don’t have to draw every branch, just give an impression. I wonder which impression he means. This path which is a stream and leads up hill. Style of live water, but it doesn’t have to be flowing all the time. It must be very old if the bedrock is exposed. Is this the bedrock or just a human construction? The red water flowing round my boots. You can’t always follow the river.

7

Butlins, I mean Rank, own the foreshore. She knows that because she once complained of wheelchair access to the beach and was told to write to them, and the following year they had installed a wooden ramp. ‘Inevitably, in due course, we will wake up one morning to the news that the whole of Minehead has become Rank plc behind our backs’ (West Somerset Watchdogs). The crunch of sandstone sand, strange moans from my old trainers. Buzzard low in the scrub trees twists along the marshy ground. I don’t like to do seasonal work, the young man said, and he is advised to do the New Deal. The Reverend Mr Davies must have kept all those utility sheets because they hadn’t even been taken out of their wrappings. They’re terrible to wash and iron. You have to pull and twist to get them straight and catch them just right with the iron. With Minehead we move to a more measured tempo. Turner shows a sweeping view over Blue Anchor Bay to Dunster Castle with North Hill and the Blue Anchor Inn in the foreground. Sweeping my view around a blue lagoon, somewhere in Italy. Dad asks if we have any brown wrapping paper, forgetting her excess of wrapping paper. A golden beach and cliffs not yet affected by caravans, where blue shadows cross delicate dry land trees. What kind of tree is it in the foreground? He says he thinks it’s an artistic tree, an oasis tree. Rugged mountains strain upwards after some violent upheaval, with the castle on its high pinnacle, O Minehead. Now I would call you mother.

8

If I pull the hood down with my hand, the water runs down my arm. I am the river. He said that Hughes became prosy and more himself in his last work, but it was not the life of the river. I thought I would die that day. Twenty eight of us set out and only eight came back. You should never go anywhere on your own or without telling someone that you’ve gone. At the carol service in Dunster I could hear her singing, standing beside me, her deeper voice, the last arrival in the pew, shorter than me, even with her hat on. She was not distracted by the sopranos. I had to let the sound go, let her go. He wanted to send out the lifeboat for us. The horse rider’s three lurchers chased around the mongrel, worrying from head to tail. Each hunt report ends with the phrase ‘the hind was accounted for’. My daughter’s at her dad’s this weekend. They’re following the hunt. She didn’t want to go, but said she would. He may be riding though he’s not a confident rider. I hope he falls and breaks his neck. The Minehead skyline changed this week as a controversial 135 feet high tent was raised over two acres of the town’s Butlin’s holiday centre. The Skyline Pavilion, as it has been named by the firm, forms the centrepiece of a £43 million redevelopment of the 165 acre holiday park. At night it is a white and cartoon ghost. Suddenly it was nine o’clock and the bell ringers. The wind sounds like the onrush of cars, losing her soft words. All the plates and glasses. No one to wash up. Harriet relies on the words - the way they sound, the way we hear them or don’t hear them. The gaps and the breaks.