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

Fire in a Canadian canoe
behind the trader’s paddling shoulders.
No glass from the gallon bottles
of supreme illicit maple-spirit
penetrates more than one tough layer
of his winter leathers. It is not
the first time the liquid has exploded
but never in this season in this lake.
Streams of fire wash around the boat
reeling as he suddenly stands and turns.

He is tempted to cup lake-water
with his hands, splash it on his cargo
of unsettled spirits, bundles of roots,
pelts and inflammable animal oils.
He will not risk that — or will he?
All is valuable: he should not jettison
anything he’s worked for. He smothers a flame
with a skin off his back dipped in the lake.
What else can he do? Where can he make
unhesitating oar-strokes to from here?

As bundles of medicinal roots,
none for burning, none for burns, make up
a preparation of hot sap, the trader bats
a path through chunks of equinox ice
in slow thaw. Maple-spirit burning out
and re-igniting flows about his boots:
they sizzle, steam and instantly go cold,
grow heavy when he jumps in a shallow
and hauls the fried canoe towards a bank.
Stones, mud and lost migratory birds.

Soon the light must pass to evening.
Shivering, not drying ... Who to pray to?
The closed schemes fall out of the sky.
Dim sparks and woodsmoke rise to find them
but finish on the wind. Old Indian deities
surviving on unmapped tracts of whistling pines
will not respond to Quebecois belief.
He wonders if he could invoke Diana —
incongruous, yet she had always danced
in an around him. Diana now at bay,

the Goddess imagined in a constellation
invisible tonight above the storm.