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

We intend to make a clean sweep of your strewn attic-
violas, glassbeads, oboes, ostrich plumes,
shed hair - half-drowned in the mirror -
we had to pull them out! We're still unravelling . . .
white scarves with red wine stains -
you wouldn't wash them out! You said
it was useless to try, they were
more than they seemed; not blood but memory
of pianos and tambourines, negro
womens' voices . . . . call and answer . . . .
turn to stone, turn to stone; you danced.

- As for that empty perfume bottle, you kept
it and kept it . . . .Your desecrated
black marble tomb! The collapsing
dressing gown you wouldn't throw out,
its ferns and rainbows
held together by a few orange threads like spun-glass;
what did you expect?
We touched it and it fell to pieces.

From the corners
where they had lodged with dust and fragments
of your finger nails
we have even prized out those
low notes of the harp
- to which you were addicted!
(. . . . mentally twining lilies!) they
made you think of gongs and funeral bells, blues,
purples, velvet and Byzantium!

No wonder your rooms
filled up with junk, with Chatterton's
"broken butterflies", with hopeless nostalgia.

Now the place looks fit to live in;
your mother and sisters willaapprove.
Your grandmother's ghost could, if you liked, move in:
the light would flatter her aquiline,
Bloomsbury nose. The furnishings are soft,
the colours subdued, the cassettes crammed with
                                                                         Vivaldi . . .
O, polished monochrome and blissful neuter!
We have done all this out of tenderness;
You will be quite safe now.