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

for John Ashbery & John Lenton

She said, “the half of it is nothing”. At once
the objects began to multiply and all had
an attractive transparency about them, like names
written in water: the bowl of apples,
the catalogue with romantic illustrations of cheap hotels,
the empty bottles.....Swept away
they were immediately missed as though
they were the only things in the world
worth knowing and keeping: the saving remnant, sludge of gems….
She said “all regrets are idle, that is their charm”
and there were arias next concerning
our personal loneliness in cities too large and too much
the same to be understood. And bloody spears
decorated with what looked like canary feathers
or syringa petals were offered as subjects of analysis,-
works of a ‘lost’ tribe. It was all getting too much.
Why did we feel so guilty? And then the face on the vase began
     to speak, -

‘I am the wounded composer’s
dead child, and these are tears -
damn it, not baubles or bangles
though you can hang them from your ears
at interesting angles.
The opera was in arrears -
that’s why I died....’

                                          A huge wasp
has taken up the road, syphoning the pumps.
We won’t go that way, we always
feared them.....Besides
he seems to be saying we could have sex right here
in this window and no-one would see us
except perhaps some insect-figure perched on the water tower
of the pointed folly (an obelisk) or the chimney
leaning Pisa-fashion over the defunct mine…Hey!
you can’t go in there. Put down that air-rifle!
And what were you shooting at? I can only see
some big leaves and, under them, some possibly lethal cannisters
of no special importance (this was a dump, you see,
from the last war, or the one before that,-
the one where they found a new, white flower like jasmine
twined round the wire barriers). But “No”
he said “although
I am yet young I know more than you
who haven’t looked across this torrent, even though
you know the bridge and walk here often
looking for the firewood you no longer need in the tower
I can see behind you on the hill that always travels with you -
I mean the tower that has always haunted me,
dominating the mesh of these outlying towns cast forgetfully over
     a desert,
from a time long before I saw it or you. No,
I was firing into an abyss, watching as the birds died
in their thousands, and all this for the sake of their music.
You see, I don’t want to be like The Others, whoever they are...”

And so (suddenly feeling myself part of the story) in turn I said,-
“Well, if that’s all there is to worry about, you and me
could go to sleep right here, curled together beside this old highway
     to Bombay or Manchester,
though, come to think of it, it does look like rain…
But these leathery leaves will serve for protection. Here, take one.”

To which the desperate reply came singing, -
“You don’t know about the poisons.
You can’t smoke here, or drink, or eat: the sign says so…”

There was something in this: the sky seemed to be
coming down like machinery in a prison scene.
It may just have been night coming on
with a puritan gesture, but we weren’t taking any chances.

The report still had to be made.
It was vital to the safety of water and trade.

We grasped firmly the shears
which cancelled our fears.

Soon the wool would fall from our eyes, and then what ore
would cover, in heaps, the granite floor!