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

I

Sleepless in your bother’s home
I know there is a niche inside the Circle Line
between midnight and morning – a parkland
of birdsong in sulphur light and silence – that ends
with Heathrow burning the desert in the west.

In this recess of sleeplessness
there is no power
in the touch and calm
of your sleeping hand
to redeem the sight (that clings
with the too sweet sweetness of mint tea)
of you in a hospital room in Marrakech –
       your wrist, slim snow blue, a shunting yard of tubes
       your breasts, wire tracked around the rosewood pink
       territory of my lips, and your lips
       crimped with urging faith against incomprehension,
              against hanging liquid
              refracting stagnant clinic green,
              against screens oscillating
              luminous fluorescent fear –

or to retract my premonition of you
going, not yet gone, having left long ago.

After Marrakech there was no night silence
in the Fez medina, perpetual with voices and roosters,
until a siren of muezzin burst the city’s starred darkness,
scattering all sound to a momentary quiet
that was broken by the racket of guinea fowl.
       I had searched out their wild call
       while you slept the afternoon before,
       from the rooftop terrace, surrounded
       by all the browns of Africa
       merging in a purple horizon
       under a homeopathy of sun,
            and found them among the orange trees below.

I am there still sleepless
swept up in that place,
but shut out by the medina’s warren of cells
fitted into a bastion of unity against my longing
                                                            for integration
        with the mosaic of that ambered and silvered land;
        with its carpeted walls and cool,
rose-petaled, water-pooled, courtyards
welling, boxed up, in narrow, stinking streets;
with my embrace of Salsabil
in a thankful, awkward, formality
that denied her deep-eyed beauty;
with the communion of her care for you;
with the brittle impress of her stranger’s body;
and with the distances of the Atlas and Sahara.
I am there still standing
on those terraces against
those cities, against that sky
and against the ravening
of my emptiness.

II

A singularity of being sleds across a glass, gull-white land –
             porous to a pestilence of shame,
             permeable to joy,
             fragile in a shuttering of light and dark.

How does that illusion, that self-sense of separateness,
persist, hold against your touch and breath?

What encompasses a sun swimming a black translucent sea:
enfolds fire and wave so they cannot blend or part?

That solitude, whole within the tremor of a tear
insensible to silken skin without, slides, wordless,
toward the magma surround of its continental edge.