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

"Worshipped in his own country
a King cobra." His line
for a new girl.

Adding to have her shiver
the right way to pick one up
and the price of a slip -
how     exactly     you'd die.

Later     as dark thinned     easing
from a nest of sheets
to watch her     unwoken
tuck a moist thigh
to the hollow he'd left

striding to work at the Gardens
under loamscented stars,
her salt a hint
to his fingertips

through long bored hours
of raking out cages, their harvest
of mouseskeletons and tiny
sour-sweet droppings, checking the papery
precious eggs,
getting the heat and the damp right

he'd sense the cobra waiting.

It made him restless this creature
that might be killed     oh yes     or caged
with a little luck     but not cajoled -
not pleaded with nor spoken for nor broken

that could leave no sour
aftertaste of mastery, at home
in all the places we can't bear

he wanted the story the earth tells
when we don't listen, and he told himself
he'd consent if he had to, to what it would take.

So that when, not for the first but for the last
of many times he slid the catch
and reached down into the cage to raise up
the heavy pliant rope and let it
flow over, mould itself to him -
arms, shoulders, chest
the brush of something
drily familiar to his cheek -
it was in a kind of reverent dreaming.

And when what had to happen
finally did, it was as if he woke
and was puzzled - between the moment
of the first astonished searing
and the moment
when the whitewalled place they brought him to
tilted sideways and blinked shut
and his ribs closed in to mop up
what was left of his breath
                                           - puzzled
at how much time there could be for a body's
unvisited encyclopaedia of pain,
for each separate organ
to reinvent itself     dying.

And there was time - enough with hindsight
for his girl to wonder had he thought of her

or picture how he might have turned a face
no longer blackened, freed at the end
from the dreadful contortions -
                                         and confiding now
as a boy's after love - to earth, claiming him.