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

Standing on the Observation Deck, the city pink and pearly,
we think of Grant and Kerr, An Affair to Remember,
or Gene Kelly, On the Town, a sailor on shore leave, high
with the dream of the girl he’s to meet at midnight.
You found a penny in your pocket; for a dollar they pressed it
flat, replaced Lincoln’s face with the grand Empire State;

you wondered if you dropped it, how long would it take
to reach the ground? Down below, there was something
miraculous in the absence of people; we knew they were there,
had glimpsed them sideways from the elevated train,
or as we walked past their lit rooms at night, their warmth
oozing through manholes beneath our feet.

We would have never have believed that just an hour before
an elevator carrying tourists like us plunged straight
to the basement below, the ambulance parked discreetly
down a side street. They never closed the Observation Deck,
and by the time we were rising to the eighty-eighth floor,
the haze had lifted, the view would be breathtaking.

What if we had stepped into the elevator an hour before?
In this version, we are saved and saved again from rattlesnakes,
from the bomb that explodes seconds later, from falling
out of love. From the top of the Empire State, danger is tiny
in the distance, the elevator slipping from our sight,
its passengers, strangers whose luck has run out,

and that penny, no longer currency, is our talisman,
a strange object we will find for years to come, trading
from your pocket to mine, appearing suddenly
in a dish of odd coins, slipping out like a naughty child
in front of the amused cashier, turning up again
and again, like the hero at the end of the movie.