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

It was an hour when the climb could allow
            no delay, for the sun had left the meridian
            ring to Taurus, as night had to Scorpio,

so, as a person does who makes his way
            without stopping, whatever he sees before him,
            if the spur of necessity pierces him,

that was how we went into the passage,
            one after the other, starting up the stairs
            that are too narrow for climbers to go in pairs.

And as a fledgling stork raises a wing,
            wanting to fly and not venturing
            to leave the nest, and lowers it again,

so I was, with the wanting to question
            lighted and put out again, reaching
            the point of someone about to say something.

My gentle father did not refrain,
            for all the haste of our steps, from saying, “Loose
            the arrow of speech that you have drawn to the iron.”

Then I opened my mouth confidently
            and said first, “How is it they can become thin
            where the need of nourishment touches no one?”

“If you recall how Heleager
            was consumed with the consuming of a burning
            log,” he said, “you will find the taste of it better,

and if you think of the way, however
            you move, your image moves in a mirror
            what seems hard to you would resist you no longer.

But so that you may find rest in your desire
            here is Statius, on whom I call, begging
            him now to be your healer where you are sore.”

“If I open to him the eternal 
            vision,” Statius answered, “in the presence of you
            my excuse is that I cannot refuse you.”

Then he began, “Son, if your mind attends
            to my words, and takes them in, they will
            shed light for you on how this is possible.

Perfect blood, which the thirsty veins never
            drink, remains as it was before
            like food that you take away from the table.

It acquires in the heart power to inform
            all of the human members, like that blood
            that flows into the members to become them.

Further digested, it descends to where
            it is better not to speak of, and falls from there
            into another’s blood in a natural vessel.

There the one makes the other welcome,
            the one disposed to undergo, and the other
            to act, because of the perfect place it is pressed from.

And when the second has joined with the first, it begins
            to function: first it coagulates, then quickens
            the matter to which it has given consistency.

When the active virtue has turned into a soul
            like that of a plant, except that the former
            is on the way, the latter already at the shore,

it works on into seeing and feeling
            like a sea-fungus, then goes on forming
            organs for the faculties it germinates.

Now, my son, it unfurls, now it extends
            that virtue which is from the begetter’s 
            heart, where nature provides for all the members.

But how it turns from being an animal into
            being a child you cannot see yet; that is the point
            that once misled someone wiser than you,

so that in his teaching he separated
            the functioning intelligence from the soul,
            because he could see no organ in charge of it.

Open your breast to the truth you are about 
            to hear, and know that, once the articulate
            form of the brain is perfect in the embryo

the prime mover turns to it rejoicing
            over such art of nature, breathing
            into it a new spirit filled with virtue

that draws into its own substance what
            it finds active there, and makes a single soul
            that lives and feels and revolves in its own orbit.

And so that what I say may seem less strange
            to you, think how the sun’s heat becomes wine
            when it combines with the juice that flows from the vine.

When Lachesis has no more flax, the soul is set
            free of the flesh, and it takes with it
            its latent self, human and divine.

All the other faculties remain mute,
            but memory, intelligence and will are far
            sharper in acting than they were before.

It does not stay, but of itself it falls
            in a way to marvel at, to one shore or the other,
            and for the first time knows its own way there.

As soon as the place closes around it there
            the formative power radiates about it
            as, and as far as, in the living members.

And as the air when it is heavy with rain
            comes to be adorned with many colours
            by reflecting in itself rays that are another’s

so the neighbouring air turns into
            the form imprinted on it by that virtue
            of the soul which, at the time, is remaining there,

and then, in a way like that which makes the flame
            follow the fire wherever it may go,
            the spirit follows after the new form.

Then, as that is how it derives its appearance,
            it is called a shade, and for every sense
            it then develops organs, even for sight.

So we come to speech and so to smiling,
            so we make the tears and the sighing
            that you may have heard around the mountain.

As desire and the other affections
            move us, the shade takes on its appearance;
            this is how what you marvelled at happens.”

And now we had arrived at the last torment
            and we had turned to the right hand
            and on another care we were intent.

Here the bank sends flames shooting outward
            and the edge of the terrace sends a blast upward
            that throws it back and shields from it a pathway

so that we had to follow the open side,
            one by one, and on one side I was afraid 
            of the fire, and on the other, of falling.

My leader said, “This is a place where
            one must keep a tight rein on the eyes
            for it would be easy to take a false step here.”

God of the highest mercy I heard singing 
            then within the heart of the great burning,
            which also, no less, made me want to turn,

and I saw spirits walking in the flame,
            so that I went on, dividing my sight between
            them and my own steps, from time to time.

After they had sung to the end of that hymn
            they shouted, “I know not a man,” and then
            softly started to sing the hymn again.

When it was finished, afterward they shouted
            “Diana kept to the woods and drove out
            Helice, who had felt the poison of Venus.”

Then they went back to singing and then calling out
            about wives and husbands who had kept chaste,
            as virtue and marriage say they must.

And I think this custom is enough for them
            all through the time the fire is burning them;
            with such treatment and such nourishment

must the wound come to be healed at last.