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

My hand still aches three weeks after her thighs
Clamped it in orgasm, though now she seems
A distant speck, loved but diminishing.
In a time of trains and transience,
The rails drum rhythms that are always right,
The emptiness out beyond cities where
Blackness and movement are the only facts.

All the women have cold hearts now. The intellect,
The genitals, are values in the territories
Commerce governs. There are no other places
To be in that do not mean being alone.
In the light above the marshalling yard,
Falling rain's rhythm lethal as steel, the balance
Between love and nothing is appallingly precise.

A train at 100 mph constantly skims
The possibility of sudden death. The days of silence
Are preoccupied with bad outcomes
On the grid where the city shows all its connections,
Its terrible net of money and circumstance.
Let down into my life these facts become
The surface I might break through anytime

In the long fall back to being alone.
At the terminus, consciousness crystallizes
Into this brilliant immobility,
A point no longer operative, surviving
Beyond cause and effect. Another train
Pulls out over the Surrey heaths,
Dawn breaking through the gaps between carriages.

She leaves only a small park with its war memorial,
Autumnal drabness and deferral
Of anything more than sitting on a bench,
Allows me grass, fallen leaves, and a sky
Whose seamless densities of grey
Impose short views and shed the damp
That's faintly drizzling through the day.