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

I see her across the platform.

She pauses, lets go of her cigarette and cries,
Have you even thought of me in the last decade?
She waves, lurches like a puppy chasing butterflies.
If you had you must have supposed that I was dead.
It is you. You look so old. Her cheek touches mine.
I must too. An awkward kiss, a clumsy embrace.
Have we passed each other on the up or down line?
Let me see what the years have etched upon your face.
Her own is one of which it might be wondered,
that fifty years ago she must have been a beauty;
now she is as handsome as a stick of polished furniture.
There are burn holes in her coat.

She turns to no one.

This is the man of whom I sometimes talk.
Not much of a thing is he?
Worn-out and badly dressed and puny,
a tasselled rag hung from an old stalk.

And what could we talk about when we've exhausted our surprise?
Not all our friends are dead.
Perhaps we remember incidents, approximate feelings.
The pith and zest of our memories are lost.
My old friend makes cold pronouncements:

Yorkshire women christening the origins of their troubles with associable names, telling the whole carriage about the wetness of water and the state of Filey drains. Should keep some things to themselves.

She twists her fingers and smiles across the train.

My memories are not what you would anticipate:
I mean not the first time we loved, or a walk in summer rain,
those would be predictable, inappropriate.
What I remember are mundane:
how you bolted me in your father’s shed;
a day I stole ten guineas from beside your bed.

My mother thought that she was a bit wrong in the head.
Sometimes she howls.
There is a smell about her, in her hair, of an institution.

There — a dog a lake, 4 trees — no, 5 — a meadow in hay.
There’s only one thing to do with a head that’s bald —
cut it then ignore it. Reading about money!
At nine in the morning our friend still smells
of solitary scotch and last night’s supper.

Of course I remember when she was beautiful
just as I recall her teaching the cats to march,
eloping to the supermarket because she liked the coolness.
I remember asking who else had had a right to her affection?

A gormless Glaswegian in a Jesus rapture, kneading a zip-up                                                                                              Bible.
Sensible lasses who married young to get the unpleasantness                                                                                              over.
No one would mistake that man for a spy, he’s got no hat, no                                                                                              chin, no
     cover.
Then those people on the platform:
squabblers, stragglers, wagglers, wobblers,
hobblers, jabberers, blabberers, gobblers,
dawdlers, swaggerers, fat blokes with cases
and that dark woman having a fit by the Daily’s.
Could spend your life in trains,
never see the same thing twice.
Who’d tattoo his face like that on purpose?

She leers in the manner of a fallen parson
pretending to be devout.
She holds out her hands as if expecting alms

then she says my name a hundred times,
each time she says it it is wrong.

Someone had told me,
she can no longer be left in the house alone.
Does she even recognise me, really?
What I want to tell her is,
that I find her smell of medication and stale tobacco
as intoxicating as when we first met,
fifty years ago,
when all our senses were deranged
and they drove us both mad.