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

And when - having taken a cramped coffee
at a concessionaire’s roundel on the mezzanine floor
of the Hall, they move off down the stairs -
the three of them know that coffee was no more than a prelude
to what can’t properly happen here. So they give not-totally
satisfactory hugs and speak or listen to I’d better go
and yes, you’d better go where going is disappearing
through a gate to a place you can’t come back from.
And the two who are left, left to wave at nothing,
seem so confused with the Carpark Payment Ticket Machine
that little bits of their, albeit minor, irritation at not knowing
what grief to feel and when, spill over in their reaction
to the Machine’s reluctance to accept well-minted coins
                                                                                  of the realm.

In the end they get it right and, soon, are nosing the Cavalier
to the exit barrier, to be spun cruelly out of a slip road
into fast-moving night traffic, where the car wobbles with
                                                                           the uncertainty
of the driver’s decision on when to join. And they listen
to what can be heard overhead which is little and confusing
with the traffic sounds; and, anyway, it is nowhere near
to the take-off time. When it is, later, when they are far
down the motorway’s corridor, they wonder about any drones
though there are few flight-paths in these parts. And neither
of these two, thinking of the other one, as night
has them turning off into a hinterland of silence,
speaks other than through breathing sounds that are
a kind of understood or not understood morse between them.