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

he’d tip them out, black and white scattering from the grainy box,
clack and rattle them around the table top
with tap-tapping fingers, clattering into face-down mode

the smoke from his Navy Cut veiled the lampshade,
draped the clock that tilted to the mark he’d made
and slid in sprays of cobweb overhead.

‘You to start’, he’d rasp, ‘you’ve got the drop’. His words.
And slab by slab a crazy-paving spread, unless we knocked for dead,
its polka-dotted potholes mirrored on the walnut cribbageboard

the pegs with which we marked the threes and fives did not record
the heartbeats ticked out by the clock until he’d scored
or how my eyes stung in the skeins of smoke, or how he’d pause,

return the domino to freckled hand and sup the beer
that I’d been sent for, nor how its lazy froth would partly clear
down the glass like foam left on the shore.

I’d dream up domino-designs to shape their other games -
stone circles, towers, castles and stockades, or how to make a maze
with numbered clues;  I’d see them ranged on edge within their box

to make a deck of cabins, or slabbed cells and holds,
concealing contraband or stowaways or slaves,
safe as bank vaults once the lid slid shut

his baccy smoke would cover mutineers in harbour
the clock would spring the fuse between the stones along the jetty
waiting for a finger on the double-blank to tap the signal ....

He’d cough:  ‘It’s you to go’.  And I would place
my spots to correspond to his, and space
the slender pegs along the lines of craters.

His box is placed with dominoes around
making random avenues of black and white
and there are secret caverns in the ground:
it’s his turn now, face down or not.