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

Mother:
‘Yes, he still believes. Imagine -
         American Jews,
                 when they die,
roll underground for three days
to reach the Holy Land.
He believes that.’

We’re standing at the Rosicrucian mini-bar listening,
                             father
         with thick, dark-rimmed glasses
blue-denim shirt,
         bristly white moustache,
         and dome forehead.

‘Your stepmother’s on the phone with her sister,’ he says.

‘He thinks he can look into the invisible,’
         she says from above.
‘He thinks he can peek into the other world,
like God’s out there waiting for him...
Meshugge!’

She starts the dishwasher.

‘As above, so below,’ he says.

‘I’m not so sure,’ I say.
‘Listen, everyone’s got some stink,’ he says,
         grabbing my arm,
                  ‘you think you’re immune?’

I shake my head.

‘To look for God is to find Him,’ he says.

‘If God lived on earth,’ she says, ‘people would knock out
         all His windows.’

‘Kibbitzer,’ he yells back. ‘Gottenyu! Shiksa brain!’

Father turns to his ‘apparatus,’
‘visual scriptures,’ he calls them,
         tinctures and elixirs,
         the silvery dark and the silvery white.

‘We of the here-and-now, pay our respects
to the invisible.
                  Your soul is a soul,’ he says, turning to me,
‘but body is a soul, too. As the poet says,
‘we are the bees of the ‘golden hive of the invisible’.’

‘What poet, Dad?’

‘The poet! Goddamnit, the poet,’ he yells.

He’s seventy-one, paler these days, showing more forehead,
         thinning down.

‘We live in darkness and it looks like light.
Now listen to me: I’m unhooking from the world, understand?
Everything is a covering,
contains its opposite.
The demonic is rooted in the divine.
Son, you’re an Outside,’ he says,
         ‘waiting for an Inside.
but I want you to know...’

‘Know what, Dad?’

‘I’m gonna keep a place for you in the other world.’