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

You were reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead and I was finally asleep. Your lips must have moved as you pronounced the unfamiliar words again and again to make them your own, your tongue pressed against the back of your front teeth, rolling across your palette, the foreign words either overripe with vowels or cacophonous with consonants, but I missed this. My dreams were influenced by the bitter scent of your cigarettes, of the wine in the glass, of the burnt-out sandalwood incense, of the popcorn that was eaten three hours earlier; perhaps it came through to me the sound of the ash you flicked into the bronze lobster ashtray, the sound of the pages turning, of you turning, of the tip of the pencil as it left its marks in your notebook. In my dream you were asleep beside me and I was lying on the propped pillows reading the I Ching and I thought about chance and contingency, randomness and the shaping forces of the universe. I struggled to memorize the many almost identical characters saying the Pinyan romanization again and again, my dictionaries weighing down the sheets. In the depth of your sleep you could not know this, but your dreams were shaped by the whispered sounds of Chinese, of the weight of the dictionaries on the sheets, of the squeaky black marker as I tried to draw the characters in my pad, again and again, to memorize the differences. I watched your sleeping face, the way your lips sometimes moved, as if you were saying something again and again. In the depth of your sleep, breathing steadily, your ribs gently expanding and contracting, you dream you were reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead and I was finally asleep.