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

While Jane, Pete and Angie drove off to buy food,
Martin went walking inside Death Valley
to see if the place would match up to the names
on the big map he’d pinned on his studio wall -
Golden Canyon and Crankshaft Crossing,
Devil Racetrack and Stovepipe Wells - and
the wide gaps between them, coyotes and ravens,
below-sea-level Californian wastes.
He told how the denim-blue sky slowly
rose like a spacecraft as each stretch of path
took him lower and layers of dunes changed
from ochre to orange and settled at brown.
He knew that the car park was high on his left
where he couldn’t quite see it because
of the crags. It was nowhere near late
and the evening not cool yet, so a few
brown slopes more wouldn’t do any harm.
The views were amazing - the sky stained the sand red -
and the next rise looked only ten minutes away.
Martin said being motionless there on a mound
and gazing around huge, silent Death Valley
brought him to one of the ends in his life.
He turned and took a right-hand path towards
the area the car park must be in
and didn’t fork until he had to, then
climbed right again. The crag he thought the car park
was behind appeared now on his left, which
meant the ridge ahead was not the one he thought,
but heading for the sunset, more or less,
should take him where he ought to be. Death Valley’s
not the place to spend a night alone, so when
the fluorescence coming up the track materialised
into a runner, Martin asked him (as
he trotted on the spot) which way the car park was.
I’ll point from over there, he said. Don’t take
your eyes off where I go - people die in here.
He ran down, vanished, reappeared at half
his height, moved horizontally along
where no path was, rose like a bubble
in a bottle to a red ledge near a peak,
became a silhouette and, for five seconds, pointed
out the way. More hollows and rises, more
breathlessness and sand in Martin’s shoes and,
suddenly, car colours in tall cones of yellow light.
Sitting by the window as they drove back
to the campsite, Martin told the story
of the paths, the colours, sky, the slopes, that
it was still, and that he hadn’t recognised
the danger till the runner wouldn’t wait.
And afterwards, retelling it, of
colours and paths, sky and slopes, the stillness
and danger, the runner’s inpatience;
how he and the valley would each
know the other again.