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

In the market
They were starched in a freezing wind

on the fish stall: how to fight back
watery tears?

With his baked eye
and the description of his body
in the pan 'silvery side up'

he is the gist of the sea:
pale thriving bodies

We shall eat him trimmed, a white packet
he is pure as a surplice, shorn of his blood

Though as I sliced off his head
drops of blood welled up from it
 
Cat played with this on the concrete outside
her affection bought with the token

Is it the fish god, his skin
torn like an envelope?

*****

Back to the faint museum
but the fish god swam overhead

He is mud-dwelling.   widespread
our human stink hunts him
our abbeys of intellect
whitish stone gatherings
wait to receive him
from cold to cold

Voices uneasy
out of the flames
talking of money. Plants are
shrivelled by cold
sprawled on the soil

He swims
he flies
he lives in the water at night

We eat him

*****

At five o'clock the Dream Fish
still pulses in its blood
I cross the frostbound marsh

At twilight     masturbate
the lonely Fish God
in his element
'Marvellous holding their selfborn form'
It takes me back to where I hide
here and there,  the room
the freezing garden,  the room
a million years     Orphaned and
still pulsing in its blood

*****

I walked out to the library
through darkening streets,  seeking my fortune
in the faint museum of print

Sky like a helmet the
final clouds fading
 
and a last welling up of the light

Tench

in his mid-land ponds,  in his darkness

mud crystal:
we all fail
imagine

under his roof of ice
inverted world,  us passing over
our shadows enormous like clouds

Evening closes the fish eye
and the door in the wall

To drown     in a pool of the sky

*****

Fish stood over
the stinking wash.  Mother of chaos
sagacious melange of secrets
that split.  It was named in air
by survival     bursting the skin
of waking

And the guts of the fish just like my own
slither out onto formica
in a heap: cat coil and cat shiver.
She gets these too

But what do I do? I go about
all over the town
and write all over it, smeared inscriptions
Aren't pure   Aren't clean

What do you do?

I am baking it in
an oven of blackness,  fish is my
teacher and victim.  Prudence
cakes made of sweet words
compacted in the right way

But night,  but night is
waiting over the rooftops,  wine to chill
the slow roasting and melting the transformation
the flames mediate,  there is
singing out of the flames

Fish is altered
in the first year he came
fish body but under the fish head
man's head:  fish tail
but underneath man's feet

speaking like a man
destroying the mind