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

Delivered into the dream of steel
                      what was that glimpse?
where the light railway bends sharply
gingerly curves through 90°
on its untidy trackway
                      all hi-tech
                      it’s all still perilously
                      up in the air
with a sharpish squealing
and brings us at a certain elevation
                      that glimpse of rufous fur
this toy-like train, to our destination
the wind-tunnel of Canary Wharf station

Bloody wind
                      like some revenge of nature
cold colourless and unending
against the cold and colourless
and would-be unending building
through every would-be public space

Coming in at the north door
of Cabot Place East
out of the bloody wind
into the dream
                      the oddly prosaic dream
a man was delivered down diagonally
before my eyes
                      in mid air
of course I mean on an escalator
                      and who did he remind me of?
a man who comes down an escalator
                      while others go up
to all intents and purposes identical
and identically-shaped women
                      pause by shops
in an architect’s rendering

                      Confessions of an ant:
what glimpse of a point
of a white tip to it?
                      I left and went
until I lost the scent of my fellow workers
                      It wasn’t far
till the smooth stone gave way
and the benches, railings and trees identical
to all intents and purposes
gave way to water-eroded
stone and long beams of rotten wood
and a beautiful length of green
old rope lurking half-submerged
and I’d got as near as I could
to eye-level with the river
end I sat on a stone end smoked
and no one looked

                      I now know why
the Eighties hated me
                      yes me
despising all I value highest
exalting all I most despise
                      It was entirely personal

a certain Mrs. now a Baroness
                      she dreamed a dream
where I’m earning my living
where the bloody wind
                      never stops blowing

                      (even on a still day
                      chill, the yellow leaves
                      still flowing

The river was in two minds
neither going away nor coming back
                      it made a big fuss
of a boat that ploughed upstream
                      waving it away
with a grand wash splashing up the piling
advancing a yard up the shingle
                      but next thing
had forgotten all about it
                      went back
to fingering the algae-covered loop of old rope
and murmuring

                      a shell, encroached by weeds
                      and shrubs and rubbish
                      an eerie incompletion?

If you see through the money
the buildings seem meant to be funny,
throwing Bauhaus, Doric, baroque,
romanesque shapes on a block
that’s still just a box and shows so.
(Nothing dated so fast as po-mo.) 

Should business become unjolly
they may be smiled on as period folly,
standing empty:
a monument to M-- T--,
Gloriana
of Toriana.

                      being not the future itself
                      but an ersatz science-fiction-
                      of-fifty-years-ago, Gerry-
                      Anderson-built-for-disaster
                      sort of future

Still there’s a taint,
stronger than faint,
of supremacist myth
about the numinous monolith,
No 1 Canada Square

                      there -
                      with the straightahead gait
                      the directness of a dog
                      but the grace
                      in its bounding of a cat
                      what was that glimpse
                      among the weeds? 

Since this is to be our tetrahedral
cathedral
let’s pour no scorn
on a too-perfect lawn.
If the fountains are over-excited
that can be righted
and time will remedy too much cleanness.
To find the red dog’s penis
nose of Thunderbird 3 arising
from the circular gardens would not be surprising,

                      night in Cabot square
                      a still October night
                      the feast of lights
                      white water underlit
                      and the dark itself
                      with the weight of voltage
                      luminous
                      pervasive gleam on steel and polished stone

but to see humanity roughen
and soften
the smooth hard edges and colour
the duller
corners; to see Crossharbour, Westferry, Mudchute be
twisted to a better beauty
more suited their solid
names, though not made squalid… 

                      Strange abstract symbols
                      surmount the facade
                      of the mouth of the tunnel
                      the Limehouse Link
                      like some temple
                      to Anubis the jackal-
                      headed or another
                      underworld god

Who’d have believed when these were dug
the whole great port would lie vacant
so soon, staring at the grey sky,
when barely a generation
back the wealth of the world, jostling,
crowded these docks with funnels smoking,
masts and cranes, a floating forest
                      is fallen, is fallen 

Sea-born metropolis
                      up on the 21st floor
looking out from the Mirror
                      canteen, seaward
eastward, on giant slabs of workless water
                      the Barrier housings
                      six great nailheads
                      driven into a sheet of metal
the broad bending Thames
shorelands set with dereliction
the half-finished and the decommissioned

and must we not dream we labour
                      to build not in vain
that even now London
                      in every moment Jerusalem
with Babylon battles to be built 

                      See now westward
sun finishes the city
                      falling through thin mist
steam plumes from the tops of tower blocks
                      and the rays broaden
shot through a rift in dour banks of cloud

                      Wide vanes slowly resolving
above low hills, alluvial plain
                      uneven urban miles
of sodium silver-white
                      their brutal
absurdity subsumed to aspiration
                      equal and lucid
a bed of quaquaversal amethyst 

From the top deck of the Docklands Express
                      a glimpse of freedom
                      vanished among the weeds
above the tunnel
in front of the mystery temple

Parallel with the simple light of earth
                      transfiguring scenes
as strong sun can render dereliction
                      clear and the ugly cheerful
the light of the world, seen shining
                      through it, makes it shine
The fox is a fact as unlikely
                      and needful as that

                      rufous fur
the black and white tip of a brush
                      lithely bounding