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

light sweeps across the calm
   August sky the gulf mirrors as we step from
      forest shadow onto the wind

      greyed platform, gusts of humid breeze a
  white noise sheltering

     us while, with binoculars aloft, we lean against
the rail, the mountain face sheer
     at our feet, an abrupt vacancy almost

     free of air, this outlook too
  oblique for anyone to see us as we take in the rocking

  boats locked in circles tightening on the far
side of a solitary rocky point we could
      not have guessed was

     advancing its finger into the narrows as we
   found our way to the apex, water-starved

   cedars and scrub hemlock siphoning us
 up a trail, the ever-present
      omniscient view glimpsed only in blinding

      shafts of glare hewn by
   trunks of second growth until we come to

   trail’s end and three whales swim
 into perspective, adjusting our unsharpened
      focus, tails caught

     by the sun before they nosedive deeper than
  any ascent we can fathom, holding in

   the afternoon air for as long as ease
allows before they rise once
    more into the vortex

    of attention, sightseers held
  at the rim of how close

  they may anchor, the whales
as insouciant as we are unnoticed, there
     and not there, the view at last

     so wide-angled from this height
  we sense no sense

   of its axes, the whales we track
fleeting and private below
     the surface of what we see, no

     less fleet than the sun motes
  transiting the sky our spinning planet

       circles through