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

12.

Pinned to a reed
that ends with a feather,
is a dragonfly.

It isn’t real.
It looks like the winner
of an origami competition.

It’s only half-way real.
Like the past.
Like what happened ten years ago.
Like what I was
a month back.
Like the present, indeed.
Like the cut and gathered mist
of what I said and thought
yesterday afternoon.

For sure, it couldn’t
be going anywhere.
And then, it does.

It sounds like paper
as it dives sideways
and disappears.
Sounds like the heavy sigh
of a man who’s worked
thirty years in a stationer’s shop.

It didn’t disappear.
The air took it.
The green of it.
Followed by the blue.

After it was gone,
the dragonfly made sense.
I could see it might have
been real, after all.

It felt different,
to remember I share the world
with such a thing.

Not much different.
But a little is enough.

I felt more responsible.
More grown-up.
I could see there was stuff
I should be doing.

I could see some of the dragonfly
in the hombre who sold me
cheese ‘n chive crisps
at a BP service station
last Thursday.

I could see
how his bright green overalls
filled his eyes with fun,
made his hands look like
they danced at the till.

Who remembers Ottilie Patterson
today?
Which seventeen of us?
Which sixteen can spell
her name correctly?

13.

It’s not at all that
reality isn’t real.
But that the unreal is.
We must make friends
with the consequences.
Amuse ourselves with it.
Be light in each other’s pockets.
Be like the small change you pull out
to buy your son an ice-cream.
Press on, yes.
Knowing that what we know,
we don’t.
And what we don’t know, we do.

Mr Tambourine Man blows his nose
into a huge red handkerchief.
I notice he’s running to fat.

A plain cow standing in a field.
That particular cow.
That one meadow, and no other.
This is what Magritte
is on about.
Blake. Rumi. The Big Bopper.

It isn’t any surprise at all,
that our face, with ease,
can share dark melancholy
and deep pleasure
in the self-same ah deepening lines.
As time claims us, a laugh at a times
Takes from us one poem,
to give us another,
that rhymes in a different,
more difficult way.

So that, at the last, we say:
beauty is the crone, the duffer,
the bent man pointing madly
at the half-moon
dangling in his neighbour’s part
of the wide and racing
mid-October sky.

14.

Around the time
of Mel Tormé,
there was a coin
of weight and gravitas.

It could do a lot
of things, things
I’ve forgotten but.
It could do one thing.

Who’d forget, who knew,
what the threepenny bit
could do, any time
you asked it?

Poetry. It could do poetry.
I use the word straight, this time.
Meaning sweet, powerful,
imaginative.

It could make a juke-box
click and whirr.
All in plain sight.
It could be Lucille, or Leroy,
Walking to New Orleans,
or Rockin’ through the Rye.
Lift it, on an arm.
Out of the circle. Watch.

Place it ... well, you know the rest.
The juke-box was a social club,
run by the threepenny bit.
And I miss it, even now.

15.

I’m not in Bosnia.
Not in the projects of Detroit.
Not on one of the hundred front-lines in
                                                           Belfast.
There’s plenty to be grateful for.

My war's a little one, deep within.
No winners or losers anywhere in sight.
No standards cut apart by no bullets.
Sorry about that.

My dear wife’s, of course, in the thick.
Sorting things out, apportioning blame.
Looking for a positive direction out.
She’s got the job I turned myself down for.
Can bring the required high seriousness to it.
Whilst I can manage only childish mischief,
food on my clothes and laughter that annoys.

Here in Emsworth across
an expansive lawn,
two cabbage whites,
unembattled,
gleefully somersault
the salty air.
I can report the small,
familiar beauties.

It’s my job.
A verandah. A teak seat.
A terracotta pot.
A phormium making a wide gesture
with a spray of purple blades.
Everything I see is animate,
watchful, willing to share.
I’m glad about that.
In fact, relieved.

16.

Some sparrows flit
from a laurel bush,
flick in zigzags
briefly on the air.
Lose themselves from me
in the branches of a sycamore.
Having fun.
You could say, dancing.
Like you could say
some dancers fly.

They remind me of Time magazine.
Whose notice upon the passing
of e.e.cummings I read
in collonaded Bologna, city of shadows and
                                                         rusty locks.
It contained two simple stanzas of his
I’ve remembered with affection
ever since:

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secret of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s Sunday may I be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young.

Time magazine.
They’d put down each
successive Kerouac novel
in such a way as made me
long to read them.

Kept those cuttings, years.
Though I think I’ve lost them now.
Kerouac on a doorstep,
with a cat and a watermelon.
Wish I could see that photograph tonight.

Kerouac.

17.

You remember the fat man
on a bench?
I said he softly broke
a little wind.
He didn’t.
He wasn’t any true poet,
but some sort of ersatz
weekend mariner,
without a boat.
I mean, he was that
sort of poet.

Poor old bloke. I malign him.
He could be the genuine article.
A retired betting-shop manager
with a two-year old canary-yellow Fiesta
and a clever eye at bowls.

He could be the president
of the British arm
of the Kris Kristofferson fan club.
Had I sat down alongside him,
he might have turned to me,
his deep eyes cold fire,
and with deliberation said:

Country music is everywhere, pal.
A cactus flourishing in the driving rain.
A gun-rack mounted on your grandmother’s
                                                               Batricar.
Fuck you know about the way things are.

Not much. I grant.

But Sunday Morning Coming Down.
Hey. That’s a nice song.

18.

You remember Gregory,
in the Rupert annuals?

I felt like Gregory for seventeen years.
A bit player. A side-liner.

But sadder. I felt like
a bit player in my own life.

Which seventeen years I mean,
it’s hard to tell. Annie would know.

Gregory. With his satchel.
Gregory guinea pig.

Time, of course, could never get at him,
safe between the covers of a book.

Or he’d’ve bought Fats Domino records.
Left Nutwood. Then longed for it.

He’d’ve grown to love the weeping genius
of Eric Dolphy’s bass clarinet.

Today? Gregory would fiercely uphold,
against all corners, the pedal steel guitar.
Its place in the human soul.
I’m certain of it. Pause.
Though I can see you’re not.

Gregory. With his belly
hanging over his belt.
In line for his shot
at the stars.

19.

A hackney carriage
darts from the lights,
on significant Sunday business.
Carrying, I couldn’t see,
a vicar to his sermon,
a parishioner to her bread and wine.

A minute later, lo,
another hackney, black this time,
a splash of gullshit on the windscreen,

holed up for the weekend on a steep driveway,
beneath an arching fuchsia,
its many bells ringing with carmine.

Most of us get taken
where the shuffle takes us.
Even if we hail a cab.
And then we, most of us,
get lost there. Sort of lost.

A bit of us doing it sort of right.
A bit of us falling to bits.
In a light-hearted way, of course.
What we do for the winners is,
we let them win.

The poets (are there some?) (a few)
have to see that what they are
are minor poets.
And understand that no-one much needs
what a minor poet has for them.
Then. It can be fun.
To fool about from page to page.
Fall to bits on paper.
Point out to nobody much
a paper truth or two.

20.

It was a 1955
Chevrolet Bel Air
Sport Coupé,
with kerb. feelers.
Chrome on chrome.
Two-tone, Sierra Beige
over Fjord Blue.
It was very beautiful.

So was the tiny
purply-black insect I saw
last Friday tea-time,
crawling up a gate-post,
with wings that caught
a show of orange off the failing sun.

What I’m saying is,
the shuffle could be
just the place for us.
Where else is there?