阿米蒂奇 诗选 （英文）

Simon Armatige (1963 - )

Zoom!

    It begins as a house, an end terrace

in this case

    but it will not stop there. Soon it is

an avenue

    which cambers arrogantly past the Mechanics' Institute,

turns left

    at the main road without even looking

and quickly it is

    a town with all four major clearing banks,

a daily paper

    and a football team pushing for promotion.

    On it goes, oblivious of the Planning Acts,

the green belts,

    and before we know it it is out of our hands:

city, nation,

    hemisphere, universe, hammering out in all directions

until suddenly,

    mercifully, it is drawn aside through the eye

of a black hole

    and bulleted into a neighbouring galaxy, emerging

smaller and smoother

    than a billiard ball but weighing more than Saturn.

    People stop me in the street, badger me

in the check-out queue

    and ask 'What is this, this that is so small

and so very smooth

    but whose mass is greater than the ringed planet?'

It's just words

    I assure them. But they will not have it.

Source: Zoom! (Bloodaxe Books, 1987)

Camera Obscura

Eight-year-old sitting in Bramhall’s field,

shoes scuffed from kicking a stone,

too young for a key but old enough now

to walk the short mile back from school.

You’ve spied your mother down in the village

crossing the street, purse in her fist.

In her other hand her shopping bag nurses

four ugly potatoes caked in mud,

a boiling of peas, rags of meat, or a tail of fish

in grease-proof paper, the price totted up

in penciled columns of shillings and pence.

How warm must she be in that winter coat?

On Old Mount Road the nearer she gets

the smaller she shrinks, until you reach out

to carry her home on the flat of your hand

or your fingertip, and she doesn’t exist.

Source: Poetry (December 2015)

The Unthinkable

A huge purple door washed up in the bay overnight,

its paintwork blistered and peeled from weeks at sea.

The town storyteller wasted no time in getting to work:

the beguiling, eldest girl of a proud, bankrupt farmer

had slammed that door in the face of a Freemason’s son,

who in turn had bulldozed both farm and family

over the cliff, except for the girl, who lived now

by the light and heat of a driftwood fire on a beach.

There was some plan to use the door as a jetty

or landing-stage, but it was all bullshit, the usual idle talk.

That’s when he left and never returned. Him I won’t name — 

not known for his big ideas or carpentry skills,

a famous non-swimmer, but last seen sailing out,

riding the current and rounding the point in a small boat

with tell-tale flashes of almost certainly purple paint.

Source: Poetry (May 2013)

Avalon

To the Metropolitan Police Force, London:

the asylum gates are locked and chained, but undone

by wandering thoughts and the close study of maps.

So from San Francisco, patron city of tramps,

I scribble this note, having overshot Gloucester

by several million strides, having walked on water.

City of sad foghorns and clapboard ziggurats,

of snakes-and-ladders streets and cadged cigarettes,

city of pelicans, fish bones and flaking paint,

of underfoot cable-car wires strained to breaking point    ...

I eat little — a beard of grass, a pinch of oats — 

let the salt-tide scour and purge me inside and out,

but my mind still phosphoresces with lightning strikes

and I straddle each earthquake, one foot either side

of the fault line, rocking the world’s seesaw.

At dusk, the Golden Gate Bridge is heaven’s seashore:

I watch boats heading home with the day’s catch 

or ferrying souls to glittering Alcatraz,

or I face west and let the Pacific slip

in bloodshot glory over the planet’s lip,

sense the waterfall at the end of the journey.

I am, ever your countryman, Ivor Gurney.

Source: Poetry (May 2013)

Armitage presents An Accommodation, from his 2010 collection Seeing Stars, a tale of estranged partners dividing their shared space with a net curtain.

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