Poem by Simon Armitage

I am completely obsessed with Simon Armitage at the moment, so it's another one from him I'm afraid.

Frank O'Hara was open on the desk

but I went straight for the directory.

Nick was out, Joey was engaged, Jim was

just making coffee and why didn't I

come over. I had Astrud Gilberto 

singing 'Bim Bom' on my Sony Walkman

and the sun was drying the damp slates on

the rooftops. I walked in without ringing

and he still wasn't dressed or shaved when we

topped up the coffee with his old man's Scotch

(it was only half ten but what the hell)

and took the newspapers into the porch.

Talking Heads were on the radio. I

was just about to mention the football

when he said 'Look, will you help me clear her

wardrobe out?' I said 'Sure Jim, anything.'

To His Lost Lover by Simon Armitage

This poem was given to me in an acting class last year as part of an exercise in reading verse and it has become one of my favourite poems. I keep a copy on my bedroom wall.

Now they are no longer
any trouble to each other

he can turn things over, get down to that list
of things that never happened, all of the lost

unfinishable business.
For instance… for instance,

how he never clipped and kept her hair, or drew a hairbrush
through that style of hers, and never knew how not to blush

at the fall of her name in close company.
How they never slept like buried cutlery –

two spoons or forks cupped perfectly together,
or made the most of some heavy weather –

walked out into hard rain under sheet lightning,
or did the gears while the other was driving.

How he never raised his fingertips
to stop the segments of her lips

from breaking the news,
or tasted the fruit

or picked for himself the pear of her heart,
or lifted her hand to where his own heart

was a small, dark, terrified bird
in her grip. Where it hurt.

Or said the right thing,
or put it in writing.

And never fled the black mile back to his house
before midnight, or coaxed another button of her blouse,

the another,
or knew her

favourite colour,
her taste, her flavour,

and never ran a bath or held a towel for her,
or soft-soaped her, or whipped her hair

into an ice-cream cornet or a beehive
of lather, or acted out of turn, or misbehaved

when he might have, or worked a comb
where no comb had been, or walked back home

through a black mile hugging a punctured heart,
where it hurt, where it hurt, or helped her hand

to his butterfly heart
in its two blue halves.

And never almost cried,
and never once described

an attack of the heart,
or under a silk shirt

nursed in his hand her breast,
her left, like a tear of flesh

wept by the heart,
where it hurts,

or brushed with his thumb the nut of her nipple,
or drank intoxicating liquors from her navel.

Or christened the Pole Star in her name,
or shielded the mask of her face like a flame,

a pilot light,
or stayed the night,

or steered her back to that house of his,
or said “Don’t ask me to say how it is

I like you.
I just might do.”

How he never figured out a fireproof plan,
or unravelled her hand, as if her hand

were a solid ball
of silver foil

and discovered a lifeline hiding inside it,
and measured the trace of his own alongside it.

But said some things and never meant them –
sweet nothings anybody could have mentioned.

And left unsaid some things he should have spoken,
about the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often.

Definitions

I am nothing, I am not your something

I am not it.
I am a bruise. I need special handling which I don't recieve.
I am a kiss on the cheek in the morning.
I am scarring.
I am a giant lampost in a land of tiny curiosities:
Money banks and merry go rounds. I am the scaffolding.
I am the chorus line.
I am thank you for coming but we have had a lot of applicants this year.
I am "but".
I am a stain. I am a spillage.
I am everything you owe other people.
I am the route to take when you'd rather not get to your destination.
I am not destruction, I am inconvenience.
I am nothing. I am not your something.

July 2009.

The Stones by Sylvia Plath

My love for poetry stems from discovering Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, so it is only right that I post some Sylvia. This is one of my favourites.

This is the city where men are mended.

I lie on a great anvil.
The flat blue sky-circle

Flew off like the hat of a doll
When I fell out of the light. I entered
The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.

The mother of pestles diminished me.
I became a still pebble.
The stones of the belly were peaceable,

The head-stone quiet, jostled by nothing.
Only the mouth-hole piped out,
Importunate cricket

In a quarry of silences.
The people of the city heard it.
They hunted the stones, taciturn and separate,

The mouth-hole crying their locations.
Drunk as a foetus
I suck at the paps of darkness.

The food tubes embrace me. Sponges kiss my lichens away.
The jewelmaster drives his chisel to pry
Open one stone eye.

This is the after-hell: I see the light.
A wind unstoppers the chamber
Of the ear, old worrier.

Water mollifies the flint lip,
And daylight lays its sameness on the wall.
The grafters are cheerful,

Heating the pincers, hoisting the delicate hammers.
A current agitates the wires
Volt upon volt. Catgut stitches my fissures.

A workman walks by carrying a pink torso.
The storerooms are full of hearts.
This is the city of spare parts.

My swaddled legs and arms smell sweet as rubber.
Here they can doctor heads, or any limb.
On Fridays the little children come

To trade their hooks for hands.
Dead men leave eyes for others.
Love is the uniform of my bald nurse.

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.
The vase, reconstructed, houses
The elusive rose.

Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows.
My mendings itch. There is nothing to do.
I shall be good as new.

When The Bees Fell Silent by Miroslav Holub

This is a new find for me. Translated by Ewald Osers.

An old man

suddenly died

alone in his garden under an elderberry bush.

He lay there til dark,

when the bees

fell silent.

A lovely way to die, wasn't it,

doctor, says

the woman in black

who comes to the garden

as before,

every Saturday,

in her bag always

lunch for two.

Child's Park by Ted Hughes

This is one of my favourite poems and, incidentally, where the title of this blog comes from [which is also tattooed on my left ankle].

What did they mean to you, the azaela flowers?
Those girls were so happy, rending the branches,
Embracing their darling bouquets, their sumptuous
trousseaux,
The wet, hot-petalled blossoms. Seizing their day,
Having a good time. Your homicidal
Hooded stare met them head on.
As if they were stealing the brands
Of your own burning. I hurried you off. Bullfrogs
Took you down through lily tangle. Your fury
Had to be quenched. Heavy water,
Deeper, deeper, cooling and controlling
Your plutonium secret. You breathed water.

Freed, steadied, resurfaced, your eyes
Alit afresh on colour, so delicate,
Splitting the prism,
As the dragonflies on the solid lilies.
The pileated woodpecker went writhing
Among the catalpas. It clung
To undersides and swooped
Like a pterodactyl. The devilry
Of the uncoiling head, the spooky wings,
And the livid cry
Flung the garden open.
You were never
More than a step from Paradise.
You had instant access, your analyst told you,
To the core of your Inferno--
The pit of the hairy flower.
At a sunny angle
The fountain threw off its seven veils
As the air swayed it. Here was your stair--
Alchemy's seven colours.
I watched you as you climbed it all on your own
Into the mouth of the azaela.

You imagined a veil-rending defloration
And a rebirth out of the sun-mixed up together
And somehow the same. You were fearless
To meet your Father
His Word fulfilled, there, in the nuclear core.

What happens in the heart simply happens.

I stepped back. That glare
Flinging your old selves off like underthings
Left your whole Eden radioactive.