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

                I.

She set you running as the building-site lifted
Its single rose to the hills.
Carried to where the pigeon-muck clogs the clock-tower;
Up through a long tunnel at the back of the market:
Your real self -
Arm in arm with a lustrous vapour;
As the lease-holders and whores tick towards you like fleas.

                 II.

All kinds of maladjustments and accidents:
Second cousins go drowned down the river,
The tower of the prison and the gates of the prison;
Brendan Behan peering through a slit
As they surround him with concrete:
How grey it is! In Manchester in the 70s,
With no choreographer
To send us rushing through shuddering exhausts,
As the kids wag it by the joke-shop,
No-one to tell us when it’s cold and when it’s roastin’
Fire in the bins and between thumb and fingernail
A white planet spins

And involved in white loop of gravity -
You will feel alive
Compared to nothing.

                 III.

A rabbit runs through the gardens -
A girl chases him through her tears.

A Star of Bethlehem floats in the rain.

Most of her short life will be spent by this
Dull and squashed sparrows' nest, this skull
Of a sheep or legendary beast;
This block of rock salt.

For two or three years you will be lost
In the royal blue of the carpet.

And one mystic winter dusk,
In a backyard kickabout,
You will get carried away:
Tackling everyone manically,
Falling into the surrendering plants.

You open your lunch-box
And are surprised by an iced-bun.

Your journey ends here.

                IV.

Free-wheel down the winter,
Push your bike up through the summer,
On the way to buy new paper,
Pedal 'til you get there, carrier-bag swinging,
Use your legs to stop without brakes, and turn in.

                 V.

Your scarf blue under the blue wisteria.
A book of satirical stories in my pocket;
My glass leaving wet crescents on the table.
This was our life; a pilgrimage to Canterbury:
Wanting to pad our tales, we scoured a landscape
That was busted and full of dead birds.

The years of the flooding water and light
Left little nests of straw on the brewing-vessel,
Rusted the key-holes of condemned buildings.
Left us high and dry, above the c.c.t.v.,
Up against the blue blur.

Twin octaves of cat-gut -

(The theme is your life and how you survived it;
In memories and in my car under a rose-diamond sky
As I drove you through chill speckles to your first day
                                                                        at work.)

Somewhere a baton sways and joy issues from us.

                VI.

Waiting at the cash-machine, she shrugs into her scarf -
Balance £20.40 - You may withdraw £40--
Her amber eyelashes light up a giant grey.
This is where I want to stall for time: at the edge of the
                                                                       rush-hour,
The winter sunrise streaking the eyes with hypothermia.

                 VII.

Above your bed the blizzard, everything let loose.
A tiny wheel of fire spins on the end of a cigarette.
The fridge is ticking cold with cams.

And, in dreams, you are holding the fort tomorrow;
Waiting for the man from the gas-board,
Taking Bowser to the vets for a check-up,
Putting the casserole on at 4,
Glancing up through a long prism of blood -
Thread from your red-riding-hood coat.

(Love abiding as the stars
That burst in super-novae,
Whose very atoms are degraded and vanish.)

The soil dries, little flowers come up -
We shall walk about and scuff the summer grass.

               VIII.

You cross a parquet floor, leaving work.
It’s late autumn and the buildings are brown mirrors,
blocks of slight resin; the evening lambent with them.

Up the grey ramp to the hypermarket -
pick up a few bits on the long way home.

                IX.

"We’re losing her!”
Up where the trees are falling off into the sky:
they wrap you in red emergency blankets,

sunlight and mirrored spires, hid, in turns,
then surfaced in bright bubbles;

and in a world squeezed between tremulous lashes -
water pouring from a bucket
over washing drying on a line
and a woman in an apron with pegs
trying to save her home from a white sky
suffocating us all with pure oxygen.

 
               X.

How from an imperfect start I was raised to average:
on a bridge of faded posters and fizzy-pop - we met -
in the charred equinox of the soul.
and I promised to refrain from lies.

Now, with your folks, on these marble steps,
Homer launched into space:
it never stops singing: many, many
brightly suffered and are gone,
as you, too, are gone.

This then is death -
a disconnected handset I pick up to claim my prize
while the sun they say will kill us all
filters lightly on the bean-patch.

              XI.

Barely touched me...
A mere collision with the Earth.
I’m not hurt, I just like walking like this,
With the world turned suddenly on its side:
The way a drunkard wakes up and seeks the comforting vision
Of the tower at Strangeways.

              XII.

On the sixth day:

Children in the park

A wavy line of light

Light turbulence turning

Reflecting everything,

Turning like the world

With slanting willows towards evening

Turning like a roundabout.

Shallow soil with fancy casts.

A voice.

Crowds of people in light summer clothing.

(Her reverie continues as the coolers and carts
move about in the shade.)