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

Elbows on knees,
hair sudded and streaked to her scalp,
she had a book in one hand
and chewed the garlic thumb on the other,
forgetting why she was in the bath
in the first place.

I was six. My mother was a
moon goddess in bubbles,
a crested grebe, an oblivious law-breaker.
She gulped books and left pots
bubbling over, she scatted
to Steve Reich and campaigned
for more school buses, she once
made me a haphazard dreamcatcher
from elastic and askew feathers.
She loved finger-brushing my hair,
making me into tingling prairie-waves
while I watched tv.

It had been her and I.
My father lived nearby, with a new
family who’d let him look after them.
He’d whisk me out to football and piers;
I would cheer and scoff chips,
I would drop pebbles in the sea
and wonder if she was alright.

Then he came like a summer,
surprised both of us.

She didn’t change,
still grazed my hair, still
cobwebbed fairy tales at night,
still plomped me on the kitchen table
and used me as a food-taster,
scrutinising my face as I chewed.
He made himself a shadow and
knew when to leave us alone.
When my grandmother was sick,
she was helpless and moody,
hid at home preening flowers
while we visited. I fought him,
loved him and hated him for it.

He stayed when she got sick.
He would lean over her
in the bath, kiss a spine-bubble,
ignore the hollows where
her curves once were.

Much later, deteriorating.
she became my grandmother.
I mended her flowers,
read to her, trying to be
her balletic hands and her voice,
coffee and marimba.

The morning when she died,
gravity wavered. I’d expected
her to inhabit me, but she, who was
always a challenge to pin down,
to win over, hollowed me out and
didn’t look back, a one-way tide.

He and I would meet for lunch,
probably looked like desolate lovers.
I would hold his shoulders
while he sobbed stones; other times
the air between us becomes
a translucent film through which
our memories diffuse.

We still meet. Only when I see
him and he I, can we remember
the precise milk drop touch of her fingers,
the pinch of pomegranate at her wrist,
the purple incandescence of her eyes,
when drunk, in the bath.