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

I offer you first
An intimate contemplation of deadly old age,
Which is not included in the syllabus
Of any college in the wide belt of the prairies.
You steal a march on all the class of nineteen-ninety-eight,
And might, by the exercise of courtesy and diligence,
Major in geriatrics simply by attending to my words,
Observing my deportment.
Take it or leave it!
    No, I mean take it —
    In spite of your disgust at mottled claws,
    Bones almost protruding through the glassy flesh.
    The lizard opacity of eyes long-ago shuttered against faces and the
                                                                                                   light.
I offer the anticipation of your own conclusion.
Wheel me beyond the sunlight;
To the grass verge there, under the leafy fruit-tree.
An apple? (Oh, Moriturus,
Don’t search for meanings where no meaning’s left!
Eve was for the dog-days when we sniffed and smirked
And was never expected here, in the garden of winds,
At the peroration.)
Set down your steel there, full in the sun,
And all my memories shall be refracted from your golden topknot.
Olaf shall be your name since once (when? where?)
I knew an Olaf such as you;
Another young golden cockerel from the world’s fringes.
Unwilling listener held by the Mariner’s eye,
Which glitters still behind the cataract,
And the barbed hooks of pity and curiosity.
Viking, contender, beginner,
Your ancestors sailed westward as our century began,
And from Wisconsin you’ve returned,
In duty, in mild contempt,
To this land of midnight sun and midday night.
    No, no! I’ll hear no more: my dying fancy is to have you as I wish,
    My last creation.
    A simple vessel inscribed with the barest identity;
    Olaf of the prairies! Olaf of old Norway!
And I, to meet and hold you,
Have made my last northward journey through the limes
Of the fallen Empire, to the barbarous forests.
A garden of grass, as I foresaw;
The empty soil thin upon a rock-bed,
Holding no pottery or temples,
Nine-tiered cities, soldiers erect in lava,
Treasures of Greece or pride of Rome.
The deep wet valley below us, as I foresaw it,
A mountain forest to the east and west
And the white-shuttered house behind us.
Pale herrings steeped in vinegar for breakfast,
As I foresaw.
An uninhabitable country inhabited only
By the sleeply descendants of dead gods and warriors.
Nothing was ever made here until now.
    Bear with me here, dear boy!
    (Bear with me everywhere!)
    Predestined meetings and conclusions
    Offend the consequential minds of youngsters.
    Was all your freedom in the Land of Freedom
    Only to make you free for this — only to make you
    An old man’s final interlocutor?
    His captive audience?
    His Eckermann?
    Or perhaps his long-forecast supplanter whose every step for twenty
                                                                                                    years
    Has been a cracking of twigs in the sacred grove
    As you crept and crept towards the doomed incumbent?
Meanwhile you plan to tell them on the campus
How you came by chance — oh, purely by pure chance —
On an ancient half-crazed Briton in the lonely pension.
Yet I shall show you that we are reciprocal
As tongue to ear,
As ear to tongue;
As knowledge is to strength
And strength to knowledge.
You are my eager heir and I your generous testator.
Without you these my last days of life and summer
Would be an evacuation in a silence:
Eighty-six years of wasted endurance and perception,
Velleities, passions, doubts and anticipations,
Memories false and true, learning and loss,
Recorded only by that improbable angel in the sky.
Without my presence you . . . oh, yes; oh, yes!
Would be down there in the valley where your eyes are roaming,
Casting your phantom downstream at the bend there.
But consider!
Fishing is better in an unfished mind.
Such hook-lipped cannibals are lurking in my depths;
Sun fish in the shallows;
Carp, eel and clouded mackerel;
Squids, pike, tuna, God knows what
Until you shall have used your skill to fetch them out of me.
    (And other fish, perhaps, long dragged from the waters of life,
    Long dead and rotted in the drought of dry air.
    Avatars; spirit communicants,
    Employing my fuddled mind for the addition
    Of notes to the margins of their watery reflections.)
Even your boredom must be borne for this,
Since reciprocity is not an equipoise,
Not the immobility of scales equally weighted
But the ups and downs of children on a see-saw.
You’ll rage, at times, against the slyness of my years
Which takes such cruel advantage of a young man’s courtesy.
And then, at some quaver of my mind or tongue,
Your own young lionhead will shame you;
Pity possess you. Anger against your pity. Pity from anger.
    And yet, before each nightfall,
    Duty and need will take up their old positions,
    One to each side of you,
    Compelling your resignation to the stool and garden
    And garrulous pantaloon declining.
Behind my hand, behind my lids I see
A fading white tracery of leaves on the black of the sky;
A stain of violet spreading like a fan;
Stars shooting from the dark; noses and lips which vanish as they come...
    But now the first hard image forms on the right there:
    A pair of eyebrows!
    They rise above the nursery screen,
    Above Jack Homer and the Goose Girl,
    And above the constellation of the Jumping Cow.
    Genially bleached and tufted on the uprising pink of an unlined forehead.
    Above them I now restore a monkish fuzz; below them
    Two eyes of violent disparity.
    The glass eye gleams with a terrible unfocusing ferocity;
    The other, indulgent, sceptical, benignant,
    Winks me my comfort at the turning on of darkness.
Here’s my loved Grandad in his kippered tweeds,
The first to appear for us,
The first to provide a text for counsels and conclusions.
Wise in his manner and appearance I can trust him
To reflect a wise light on his conjurer.
    A gun-butt folded
    Into the winter-bright cheek.
    Bang, bang on the morning sky
    Green above the marshes
    Black barrels pointing
    At long necks straining for the sea.
He grunts and creaks
Into an evening chair;
Imperial face
Above the tyrian of his coat.
    A horse-back emperor now
    Heavy in the stirrups.
    Old roan descendant
    Of battling palfreys
    Nods in the autumn of his race.
Head, laughter-shaken,
Over the cue
Nestles the bright green cloth.
    Now the ripe nose twitches
    At the ruby rim.
    Lips smack the soil of Doure;
    An eye glows red as the wine.
But here, and far the noblest image,
The king stands planted to receive the peacock from the wall behind him.
The folded tail bends low as the bird comes down on his shoulder,
And the long neck writhes for a balance.
The man’s head turned like a bird’s to the hovering bird-head.
Then a sharp little dip of that rosy pate, a signal
For the bright-eyes fan to be spread in the air behind them.
Festive creatures, old and male,
Engaged in an ancient pageant of man and beast:
Heraldic insignia.
Alas, alas for the fading of blood and feathers.

     Or rather, damn my facile and misleading rhetoric, I would do better to say alas for all such stale tributes to received ideas and expected sentiments. It isn’t my intention to join in the worship of my ancestors or to offer up regrets for a past which deserves from me a far more scrupulous attention and judgement.

     So our capacities grow parched with the years! Cockcrow and coxcomb fade when the superannuated rooster no longer struts in the farm-yard! No cause for wailing there that I can see. For my part I’ve had the happy experience of appetite and capacity jogging downhill together in amicable harness, their noses more or less level.

     Or so it seems, at any rate, as I talk to you now; and since I’m an old man, firmly resolved to exploit every privilege of age and exhaustion, I mean to speak to each moment exactly as I feel inclined I shall submit, in other words, to every passing influence of my mind or stomach. The result, no doubt, will be a contradictory narrative and many violent alternations of mood and outlook; but for the time being I speak with an easy belly, and consequently with a welcome equability of mind and temperament I advise you to bask in this mood while it lasts.

*     *     *

Now I show him in the shadow of Hercules;
Grandad possessive on the close-mown grass of the terrace,
And the leaden hero riven in the sky above him.
Each standing figure is jauntily inclined to port,
On club and ashplant,
But the man’s the jauntier by his billycock and long cheroot.
A beardless King Edward
Overlooking ten thousand acres of his border earldom.
And if he were to cock his good eye to the right
There’d swim into its westward corner the pale grey liner of his house.
Palace of Ramillies!
Vanbrugh’s domed glory in the northern hills!
    Eh? Eh? The leveller’s sniff?
    The tribune’s indignation?
    A bas les Aristos?
    Au poteau les Ci-devants?
But patience, boy, patience!
Splendour is one thing.
Virtue another.
Glory observed
Shows no humility,
No lovely face of labour,
Hope of man’s brotherhood.
It lacks the good fellowship
Of Elks conventioned in Winnebago.
I speak of a glory
Long-ago trampled underfoot.
Don’t waste your rage
On a glory already departed.
    Below us, then, in the first of the seven valleys
    The labouring reapers lean along their scythes.
    Gold men observed,
    With negligence but not in ignorance,
    By the paternal eye of the fourteenth earl of Bulmer.
    Green tweed breeches wrinkled at the knee;
    Stout woollen columns of his country legs
    Supporting the flaunted comfort of his belly.
    Glassy and benign his double gaze,
    And ‘Dick,’ he says, ‘this sun’s a penance.
    ‘By your good leave we’ll now turn home —
    ‘Discuss some cooling liquers in the colonnade.’
Always he affected a certain mellow pomp of utterance,
Which I, to make you hear and smell him,
Have partly adopted for this grandparental opening.
Call me ape or parrot if you choose:
I call myself a rare magician,
Prospere of the forests, conjuring
So many long-silenced voices, and faces long-ago melted from the bone.
My voice shall speak like a wand and wave you
A thousand scents and whispers of what you call history.
(I call it life. I call it all.)
    It must have been the era of that Hall of Mirrors
    Where statesmen, victorious and defeated,
    Met in the dignified equality of morning-coats.
    Returning officers
    Put on the bitter faces of neglected heroes,
    And I, our hero, was a five years old, being born
    At the very moment of the old world’s ending.
As I first squealed for breath the helmetted Uhlans
Rode up the further slope of the wooded valleys.
Poilus opposed them in the scarlet breeches of Sedan, and
A continent of Ruritanias fell there.
Kings in epaulettes;
A lady or a monk behind the throne;
Three emperors still, and still
A sultan dying in a toe of Europe.