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

I woke up eyes opening
On the whole curved sweep of the bay
The grumbling old men
hadn’t written the books I wanted, leaving me
Loose on a beach lapping out of sight
In a spin too slow to be at a loss, to
Fetch from underfoot what lost footing,
A stock lump called babalwbi,
Silurian drift of air wafer like the surf
Turning lateral sibilants into chain alliteration,
fossilised coral,
fallen from the sea bulging with the likes of us,
the boats the sheep, the
words you soften at the start and slenderise at the end.

Space built up of passages that interconnect
but never go far, could we use that
for a littoral chain-stitch
not rich in roads and towns
where what stops in Skye
might start in Marrakesh? to abstract the maths
of an endless surface and no outside
that could reckon
Not the ocean
Checkless moving around one fluid northwest axis
But the concept of the ocean
The very wash of our geosophy
emergent glass with 360 panes and no centre.
Making headway through the Celtic archipelago
A boundless littoral
Unrolled like linen
where you are never any further away.
The mirror washing in shears twin planes of social laws
Of phoneme arrays
Spanish town names matched to Irish ones
Shimmering plane of beached wave drafting curves.

A cassocked figure leans from the pier
And shouts down
Distinctly, but in Welsh,
Where are you from?
What is social structure?
How is experience organised?
What are the rules which permit you to identify?
Beth ydy adeiladwaith cymdeithasol?

In the middle of this sea province
How we think of it is our choice
As a set of excellences recorded in strict verse
A line of hops between soft coves for coastal vessels
The movement of formal groups conducted by sound
Or the running of beef and hides down to arid Spain
A set of symbolic objects tied to real ones
for the purpose of exchange;
the way we go is what we find
a non-scalar map of references
pointing out of either side of my head
where my senses lie collecting:
suspend now the eastern investment and the French routes,
hang on to Tartessus
the monopole of the whole pastoral recession:
bales stamped with words in Punic business hand:
at St Malo
heathland grains, buckwheat made up into pancakes.
the prevalence of cats by the fishermen’s dock:
out on the Western Approaches
waiting for the clouds to part
and show the conduct of the stars:
standing off from a Cornish promontory
the Cyclopean villages visible inland
stone jambs where timber is an import
the sheltered gully, green, down
to a porth with the fishing smacks drawn up:
at the mouth of the Ystwyth
wading through the surf shouting about a hot drink
falling along the predrawn lines of least distance.
Or, how was Spain before the Spaniards
Whether Pokorny was right about those Berber cattle breeds
Or come to that the Iberian verb system,
An eager sort of Bronze Age dog,
Or a kind of sheep used to travelling by boat.

a 3-dimensional meander
salt flake glistening
in curved inlet
drawn lax vacuity
bringing forth wealth
inmost healing loss

detritus whose environment is itself
wafer fluent
a skeletal tendril                                             [the CORAL
pitted with permeations
backwash drifts
cellular vortex
recessively lapped

How much of the Atlantic
in each pore of coral? how much
of the oceanic culture strain
secured in me?
A scale pattern
Of a living sense dissolving at a glance
I jitter intent to hold the jitter thing holding me
my eye failing for want of cleats
on a skittering fish-scale surface
in the topos of borderless egoless states
Seized in a net and unseized.
The vacancies
but not clarified as posts, tied to individuals.
Social that same old riddle
Always starts in the middle structure
Where language flows through foramina
And runs in suspended circles
gently expanding
to amount to a family

But what I think is where I live
by the estuary calmly funnelling craft
from the outcomes of the Parisian Basin
And its weatherproof hangars of goods and ideas
For an hour each side of high tide.

Out here, populations don’t aggregate
They carry poems in their head
Packed in rules of assonance
A kind of enforced surplus of symmetry -
(This crossed the water sometime) -
Memorising the faces of hundreds of sheep
Consulting the neighbours and people like that for
Linguistic waves, slowing towards the western edge.
A ripple deflecting on with holes
(what’s this? ethnicity as mispronunciations?
the border as
an awkward lump in the sound cone?)
Poetry in the absence of cities
Fused with kindreds
As the superindividual might.

From facts into grammar
A board
Within which space has callable rules
Of transit & contingency & address
The shingle addresses the whole question of proximity
Turning over and over
Too small-cut to possess memory
the smoothness of outward records contact time
its structure is all washed up.

The ocean uses fish to weigh down its catch of water,
Uses pebbles to count its pebbles.
I seize on the brilliant stones
and to break the surface of loss
throw them away again -
she threw me back into the ocean
at St Ives or nearby,
innovating,
and I swam with the fishes
cruising the domain of the soluble
and like a little bit of Avonian driftwood
I bob into shore here in Aberbabalwbi,
Like a gull skittering over a slate roof the
loss skittering over the sea, and The Matters keeping
in the National Library up on the hill -
head back to the values of icecream and sunshine
A little light rain
To bring the ocean to a scale we can handle
As a wash of loving forgiveness.
I am what I think,
The culture is what it says
The ocean starts where it ends