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

An old man wrote this, during the last days
of his life, in a summer of the 1920s

Fog-fauntleroys at dawn, and deft
Hallucinations that a governess
In Henry James would know, when she was left
Alone, the children gone with their
Most absent father to a beach or fair —
The garden mists, those ghosts of happiness.

Dead life, so much proportion, so
Much growth is no preventer; you persist
Like amaranth. You are what some must know,
To whom, though fogs evaporate
Their fluid symmetry, the sun comes late,
And moral parents wreck the furtive tryst.

Little deaths, over and over
And over, the girl in black, that heroine
On lustral walks, that life she must recover
From Sapphic hags of circumstance!
Am I occult? her soul and her remembrance?
For I remember she would not go in

One summer night, and walked about
The lawn, her eyes on nothing, seeing all
Inside her as a noxious web. That lout,
My father, called her name, his hand
On a decanter, window wide, a stand
Of billiard cues half-glimpsed against a wall.

Her name! Contemptible, and clear,
And he had said it, much against his will.
‘Damn that woman! What’s wrong with her?’ See her,
She is of always, with lilies
By the lily pond, with fruit beneath the trees.
And who can tolerate such thick survival?

But I can talk to that mouth I
Cannot kiss; and her hand, my hand, must hold
Tight together, and neither of us die.
By adust walls, or the sun-dial,
Let life and time be free, no cark, or trial —
Oh, the shadow moves, only I grow old …

She died before, she cannot die,
And I falter on paths grandfather cut
Through woods once nobly hunted, and the sky
Reaches for me, and the hounds bay
Far off, my sister, woman gone away
Not ever, and not yet, where night’s doors shut.