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

Here at the world’s edge the moon was almost full
last night, dragging its trail across the sea, pulling
stunned water into shingle’s finned arêtes.

It laid a tide of flotsam at the beach - bladderwrack,
dismembered crabs, cuttlefish, driftwood, turds of
engine oil, peat-cobs, a woman’s shoe cargoed by

longshore drift. Now a message in a bottle weighted
with stones. It must have bobbed gleaming in that
glare of moon as we made love so unexpectedly, fallen
into sleep until the edges of our dreams touched
to wake us. Afterwards, we rose, opened curtains,
watched a trawler lit from bow to stern riding out the

swell, its fairground gaiety stilled by salt, night’s depth,
uncertain dark. The treasure map parts in your hands,
shows a skull, crossed bones, a windmill, the marsh

where whatever is buried sinks under its portentous
scarlet cross. The way things look it didn’t get far, just
lilted back to the same beach; maybe those kids knew

the sleight-of-hand of tides and planned it this way,
or maybe hoped to beach their riddle someplace far off
they imagined a curious people were, eyes turned to

the cult of equinoctal seas. Curious, the way last night
I laid my ear to your breastbone to find what I’ve always
sought beyond fathomable skin, your deft hands

signalling unsaid things. I heard blood ebbing then rising
with each emission of your heart, that’s all. Today we’re
gathering sea-coal, spars of jet, amber and amethyst.

Waves furl, rub pebbles into grains of scarcely diminished
time, infinite worlds whose horizons can’t hide the ancient
stare of newness in the dawn. The sea glitters, a fishing boat

drops its nets. You’re signalling another find, waving from
the spray of a clouded sky towards something far out
for which words have blown over or away.