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

We wake at dawn and climb through forest light
and the conversation of small birds.
Punta Galinero’s crags are bleached
blonde by a mile of milky air,
as flat as the backdrop to a Fifties western.
Water pours like icing sugar
into cobalt pools and is swallowed
and the gorge rings with the roar of it.
We rise for three hours in a groove
of green shade then surface
in the limestone basin of the cirque
where the glacier began its long scrape
and all this sweetness ends.

We zig-zag up the scree, a hairpin
scramble from cairn to cairn,
the valley floor compressed a little more
by each turn to a diagram of streams,
the sky ballooning as we enter it.
Punta Tobacor is millions
of tons of hardcore, dumped.
There is lichen and scrub-grass
but no flowers, and the thunder,
when it comes, comes from below us.

We are on the edge of our domain,
that seam of good air, fruiting plants
and navigable waterways
that separates the earth from space,
an almost negligible bloom.
Go five miles north and nothing changes
but the words you need to buy a loaf
or start a fight. Old men still smoke
while kids do wheelies on a borrowed Vespa
and a dog sleeps in the shade.
A mile upwards and the body starts to die.
Oedema, cyanosis, blackout…
You can feel it even here. The ease
with which you lose the path, the tricks
scale plays with the eyes, this thirst.

We broach the ridge and walk into the song
of Spanish and the reek of the latrine.
Goriz: a house cemented to a mountain.
Having dropped our packs we stand like cattle
drinking in the stillness as the chatter
washes round us and the further peaks
go smoky in the falling sun.

I look back down the sloping path
and see the route we took as four lines,
shaky as a child’s drawing,
knitting cairn to cairn to cairn
then being gathered with the streams
and fed into the green groove of the valley,
down to Torla, Bujaruelo, Gavarnie,
Toulouse, Heathrow, to homes, to offices
and meshing with the scribbled web
of every journey ever made, a sphere
of filigree eight thousand miles across,
thinned almost to nothing at the poles
and in the high and desert places,
long skeins of flightpaths,
gossamer lassos thrown into space
from Florida and Kazakhstan…
And underneath the lace that spreads
across the oceans, hardly visible,
a fuzz of tiny roots that mark
the final minutes of the drowned.