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

O’Grady wanted to see Mount Fuji
but never did have the pleasure of
hiking around Japan with a metre and
half hexagonal wooden staff covered
in ink stamps to show what he did
while carrying a pack on his back
the size of a small kitchen fridge.

It happened like this - things
started well, he said.

It went back to the time he resigned
from his job in a Liverpool factory
as an engineer constructing complex
precision tools we all use everyday,
there were seventeen hours in most
when he would not see daylight at all
until, that is, a light went on
when he decided he didn’t have
to live out his days in artificial
stygian deep light surrounded by metal
dumb mangled things attached to cables that
had evolved uncomfortably close to
perpetual motion. They did not want him
to go, offered deals, incentives, promotion,
all of which made him more determined
than ever to take off and see the world
beyond the crude sheet metal walls and steel
beams of a huge manufacturing machine.

We sat on simple futon, barefoot on tatami
listening to our fellow traveller’s tale,
whose sole reading was Lonely Planet guides,
for he was content to look and drink in
all the new sights, the images his eyes
could hold enough seconds for his brain
to process and store them in memory,
just as I remember his tale and his bid
to reach the top of Mount Fuji which began
when he sat down to rest in a temple garden
in Tokyo away from street festival noise
loud and cacophonous outside on the street.

When he noticed the noise was outside
he began to touch an inner silence not met
                                                          before.
Climbing Fuji was to be a pinnacle that would
mark the ability to see the earth unfold below
him rather than somewhere above and beyond.

So, a train was taken with all he had
in the world on his back and a constant
straw hat called Intrepid perched on his head
completing the image of traveller whose
pilgrimage could only be revered in the East.

With a growing sense of liberty - a word
he would instinctively not use - not being
a political animal - someone whose joy
for life and sense of the lyrical living
                                                     through
existence knew misuse, by that same instinct,
responded by bursting out in his own
controlled freedom like a young bird
feeling the strength of its new wings
in the sublime shift of flight feathers.

He climbed off the train at what he thought
the correct stop, smiling at the barriers of
language - but could not see Mount Fuji
                                                          anywhere.

Undaunted as the weave of an Intrepid
straw hat can be he looked around
to check, then asked where Mount Fuji
could be. Over there, the fingers told him.
He looked, but could see nothing and
perhaps for a moment he might have thought
that’s what he was meant to see
and released have realised nirvana without
having consciously made the attempt
though both ideas are equally unlikely.

“Where,” he asked again, and again
the fingers pointed over the land at mist
that higher blended with the sky
like a curtain over the window from which
to watch Mount Fuji.

“What is the best way to Mount Fuji?”
he tried, taking a different tack -
but human levels of communication in signs,
phrase book and helpful encouraging faces
did not succeed though both sides tried
with all kinds of enthusiasm to understand.

He still climbed on a bus, as the small
gathered throng of people urged
and faithfully climbed off again when people
on the bus said, but still he could not see
Mount Fuji never mind find a way to climb
with the kind of purpose of which
he had convinced himself and sat
down again clearing his mind of thought
while he thought he sat down to rest.

He decided, at last, this was best -
to leave the quest to climb Mount Fuji
unfinished, had been some kind of destiny
thing or task to see if he could strive
for big things beyond the material and
without getting bogged down in theology
through a quest to touch the shape
of perfection attainable in nature.

Of course, he did not say any of this,
it would have been - not beyond him -
uncharacteristic; for his senses
responded to the moment, were stored
not to re-interpret but to relay
the facts in a way others found endearing -
a true traveller - a Zen monk with all
the appropriate apparatus. Some would
say his lack of achievement to see Mount Fuji
when it was actually there was an
achievement in itself even though it did not
look the way it does on postcards
or adverts for the shinkansen high speed
                                                               train.

Last time I saw O’Grady was when
we met again at Takayama railway station
us already booked and heading for Nagoya
he not sure - Kyoto maybe for a few days.

He was happy as he strode out to the platform
Intrepid on his head and the small fridge
of all he possessed in the world on his back.
We said something like “see you again”
knowing there is always that chance in the
                                                                world.

We watched until he was out of sight
on the platform and his train had come and
                                                                gone.
He never looked back. The quest carried on
with the next real step away from an unreal
Mount Fuji not there for him - a journey to
                                                         Australia.

I thought one day he would finally reach
the end of his journey in this world
visiting places, seeing faces, talking to
                                                            those
he would meet and never see again
to sow the seeds from which he would
finally reach the harvest laid out before him
in his tracks and find he had already
climbed his own Mount Fuji without effort.