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

                                                        (for Ben, in memoriam)

Coogee

The sign is formal, naked, elderly as the wizened walnut women
in their Speedos, who sit at the entrance, collecting 20 cents
admission in an old blue plastic icecream tub.

                        Coogee Ladies Swimming Club
              Women and Children Under 8 Years Only
                           Saturday Morning Competition
                                          9 – 11 am
                                        All Welcome
                                                              No one calls it the Ladies’,
                                                                    it’s the Women’s Pool,
salty in friends’ mouths. Hangout
for Enmore lesbians and Western suburbs Muslims,
who bring their small boys who stare at the bare breasts
their mothers – devout – won’t.

The headland drops, a fort into the sea,
confronting the Pacific moat.
A line of topless sunbathers overlooks
from a thin battlement of grass
claimed by only the earliest risers,
vigilant in tanning.
                                                              Us late-in-the-days scatter
                                                        among the boulders at the foot,
                                                      that are chopped into tiny islands
                                                       when the tide is up and bucking.

Anarchic waves breach the safety chain,
churning would-be lanes with sea urchins,
with crabs, fished into a hurling stew.
Diligent swimmers with swelling shoulders
keep their heads down, stroke forward.
                                                My skin licks the water. My armpits
                                                                                                 salt.
Two round young women, inner-city pale,
shaved heads, wet white t-shirts
to ward off carcinomas, roll each other in the rough end.

Beachballs in love, the girl buoys
splash, delirious
                                                   at the absolute edge of the country
                                                                     I want to keep leaving.
Seeing you bobbing lifeless,
                                                                        a body in the waves.

Manly

Your news was thrown up at me
out of a conversation, the way your body
landed, finally, on the beach at Manly.
Without ceremony.

I missed your funeral. The people who knew
forgot I knew you. Context too far gone
to stay on the surface, to stay afloat.

But you were hometown.
You were Sydney in summer,
camp as a hot Christmas.

Sizzling the December afternoon,
sashaying into rehearsal
– a dazzling giggle of a man,
in women’s lime green support-knickers
and sneakers. Girly brave.

Sliding from your pushbike,
you drummed Latin rhythms
on your bare chest, your shaved thighs.
Sweat danced off you. Even your breath
was percussive under my vocals,
my brother’s bass. We – the band –
adored you. You thawed me.

Drawn early and always to risky heat,
the year we met you waited
in the back of your highschool teacher’s car,
between the baby seat and his wife’s dry cleaning.

Tuning your guitar on my front steps,
you whispered swiftly into the strings
of near misses with police;
but never what you kissed
for yourself behind cubicle doors,
your face pressed against tiles,
courting the hardcore.
It’s what we’re not meant to tell,
about men we love.

You made beauty from the bones out.
Your quest sparked your mouth and limbs.
You questioned everything.

Dragged up to slap minds open,
to slap open mouths shut.
Give them something to gawp at.
Gold hoop earrings and a day frock.
Denim cut-offs and a ponytail.
Feather boa and a sweet falsetto
trilling up King Street in the summer dusk.

Coming out at three a.m.,
you felt the air shuffle at your neck
and turned to duck the swing again,
the blow in the dark with a steering lock.

A man in a dress in the Sydney night,
holding the light to a touchpaper,
any day of the week.

But no one saw you shimmy from under the arm,
take the dive onto the ocean rocks,
this time. You simply went.

Your death is an oxymoron. Impossible
to put into a sentence that makes sense.

I just expect to see you at the bus stop.
Kissing me, kissing my brother,
on the lips. Leaving us
to wait for the nightbus,
in a duller darkness.