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

It goes on. As is and as ever. New England fall
Foliage beyond the station sign reading Mystic
Over the smaller Connecticut. I had woken in New London

To Hopper's sunwashed Sunday brick-and-green. Steel-blue
Sea under the shadowy lip of wetlands, a white steeple
Needling the blue of Jonathan Edwards. I thought of mosques

In the alpine Indian summer woods along the Tuzla road
A month before: squashes and pumpkins and plums
And wines and roses and ivy-reds and apricots

As if flaring into their last identity of color
Before the end-stop of winter. Then in Amtrak's Westerly
I glimpsed its Old Charter Quaker sense

For the first time. Leaves and wrappers swirled
And gamboled in the ltalianate portico. Inside I studied
A high criss-crossed window's single sheaf of ingots

Like a stook of light illumining the floor. The clerk
In the ticket booth - mahogany, clock-capped, refurbished -
Would have clone for Charon in that hour's tale. In the side room

Where the wainscotting had just been undercoated
An old sign in the detritus read Through Subway To New York
New London and New Haven and for a second it bespoke

The new in New World as I moved towards what proved to be
An old scales with brass weights, fixed to the floor
By pilasters of cast-iron echoing the flutes on

The stoops and storefronts in SoHo. Had I ever been in
Before? It looks different, the clerk answered, because they lowered The lights. I looked up at their hung globes

Under the fall luminousness of the high windows. Now all
That lay ahead was a taxi-ride and quick flight
To an Ithaca glimmering over its bluffs

At the cusp of a bright day. Walking the taxiway apron
By a verge of dead aftermath, summer in scarecrow,
I watched the taut flap of a windsock in Rill flow

Against the tree-line's umber-through-vermillion.Take-off
Would be out towards the unseen Atlantic
And a day moon I suddenly noticed low in the East

Ghosting the lapis like half a sand-dollar,
Or a child's hourglass whose specific gravity
Was sifting the bright life of nothing in particular.