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

         for Sara Chapman

I.
Tomorrow when the sun
has laddered up,
                              flaming,
across the hooded blue,
I will have slipped
into my 35th year:
for centuries
an age few people met.

And here
the silence of the future:
                                    early morning sky,
moonmapped for the sleeping traveler.
Death’s dreaming twin.

II.
What passages do we make alone?
And where do we go when we go there?

How strange to believe
we journey from one year to the next.

How so like us to think
we move forward.

If there are crossings,
we want to believe we make them.

If there is solitude
we say there are others.

III.
On that bridge,
                        in that city in Switzerland,
you said
               community is work.

For all I know, God may be in both.
For all you know, God may be both.

IIIa.
It was almost impossible to discern
the river from the sky:
                                  the tidal darkness:
the people on the promenade:
the bridge
from the water.

IV.
It is the evening before my 35th birthday,
and I am standing on a bridge in San Francisco.

One year ago, we traveled from Switzerland back to Paris.
We drank champagne on your balcony.

It was the evening of my 34th birthday.

I remember nothing else of that day
except the sky,
                        which comes back only now
as I look out over the city:
it’s that hazy blue,
                                 the jacketed deepness
that keeps sneaking along the horizon,
heading toward the color of some other person s memory.

IIb.
We want so much.

IIc.
We only believe
                         in what we ask for.