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

Quest is not the question but the questioner. Arrival
always takes you on to another place. Perhaps we have
got this together at last. You and I and all the voices.
Speaking of or spoken for, the dialectics of direction, the
small talk of the soul, the particulars of self. Voices
in and out of reason and that assurance when we set
off, see the distinguishing features peter out, lose the
landmarks, know that an immense adventure is about.
What do we do and what did we plan to do, those
careful strategies written to satisfy wives and mothers
and sometimes gods? To chase our heroes. To create
fictions in the gap between confidence and confession.
Tap Tap; I am about to enter the uncharted.
Tap tap; I am about to march off the map and.
Tap tap; from this distance I can see islands that
nobody has ever reported before, or the reportings
were false, or the account was flawed because of
sex. Or God. And the trick of dreams is to take
us there and offer us the fruits and the sunsets and the
bathing in moonlight and nobody has heard of sharks.
Nobody has seen the soldiers who have dug in behind
the hotel facade. Nobody has checked why the
night porter is writing a history of hotels and the
camera in the men's room has never been switched
on. Is that Graham Greene over there? Are we allowed
to talk like this in our rooms? Will our letters ever get
through. Suddenly the classroom reappears, the school
library, the sofa in the summerhouse; mother's bed floats
in onto the beach. It is gold. It is singing. It is August.