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

One step on the frozen stair
down to the frozen river.
I am not a suicide but a would-be skater,
sleep-skater on the midnight
midwinter Russian ice.

You must keep walking
for the cold can reach your heart
at the speed of just three standstill breaths.
You must chafe your cheeks
against the frost's white bite.

One somnambulist stride
on the packed-snow street
can turn into a glide that takes me anywhere,
'traveller on the earth'
on the keel of a shoe heel.

We made paper ships
and sailed them together
on a bright round pond in the Vale of Health,
blowing up the water
till our vessels tottered.

I was sixteen a long time
on an ocean of events.
Having no watch we were surprised by shadows
blackening the water
under our ghostly boats.

Wet paper fattens
and furs with moisture,
the print blurs to a language that we cannot read.
The water is freezing,
our ships run aground.

I skated into a cul-de-sac
as I slept this night away.
My way is barred by marble steps up to the plinth
of a child's marble tomb
and the dead child's image.

'I hold her in my arms
till I am near falling',
this boat-shaped stone creature the colour of snow
packed and patted into
a serene awful doll.

Cold must reach your heart
from ice pressed to the breast.
'A hollow leaden vacancy looks out' of the eyes
that are not eyes at all
but shallow thumbprints.

'Were I to float by
your window drowned,
all you would say would be "Ah voila!"'
There she is, gone at last,
her hair a stream behind.

But I've learned to swim
in the sea, monsieur.
'The waves jump down my throat' and I'm unperturbed
by depths beneath me,
treading them under.

And it's you who pass
at the window of your coach,
your resolute pale profile like a suicide's.
I have stopped on the verge
to observe your going.

Motion and freezing,
ice skin on the sea.
'We glided along like ghosts at midnight'
through the silent streets
in a lightning sled.

My cold breath hangs
in a cloud over the bed.
I have 'no permanent township on the globe'
but lie like a boat
icebound by winter.

Freezing and motion.
The ice sheet must craze,
this sleepwalker flee on its disintegrating floor
to reach that horizon
where the waves break.