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

           for Roy Fisher

The brown Thames
laps against timbers.

A fragment of Roman wharf
is bound against a pillar,
ancient water-worn wood
against carved stone.

Inside St Magnus Martyr,
splendour
of Ionian white and gold.

I listen for the music
that the poet heard.
From memory, I piece
the fragments of a song.

*

Passing where the boat went down,
it was not your dream you told me,
or mine, but I had to follow,
                                             down.

Man out of air, choking.

How slowly death comes,
though it was minutes since he stood,
glass in hand,
charming and enchanted.

A sleeper on a bench
beside the river, struts
digging in his side,
turns restlessly
as the half-dead man
who dreamt that he was drowning
pops up, seal-headed, the city
with its millions of feelers
ready once more to take him in.

*

For indeed it is everywhere death
that uncovers its plague-pits
and ashes and unclaimed corpses.

Death and the desire
that clasps us in the press
or shoots us full of glances
or holds us water-mouthed
in front of images that consume.

Ebb tide reveals where London has crumbled.

Things once animate with use
are sheer matter, glutinous, unshaping:
brick, plastic, iron, rope, wire;
granite sets of a causeway,
ground down, washing away.

London on London
sunk in Thames mud.
Yet each set
is also a way for the vagrant mind.

*

Red, purple, lilac,
hand-crafted, laid:

the beauty of brick,
brittle,
crazed.

Haunted.

*

A man in the rush,
sent sprawling
by another,
lands at my feet
on grey, spittled platform.

He lurches up and is gone,
and in the instant, before
I can reach out a hand,
we are all of us one
sea-bed of identical skulls
over which grey silt
settles and congeals.

*

Walking between the New Globe
and the river, I think of the old man
and the son who leads him,
on the Dover road,
bringing him to the edge
of a high cliff, from which he jumps.

What an imagined fall!

Walking in the city that is continually
being made and unmade,
I think of the cliff
which Edgar built of words,
and his father's leap,
down,
down ...

*

To see
by way of words.

Stile and gate,
horse-way and foot path.

Do you hear the sea?

Here's the place.

*

The poet's river glides by
or oozes stickily under the wall.

It is also what exists
in the eyes of a cormorant
perching on a floating platform
above Westminster Bridge.