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

       I was a child.   I sailed my green boat on a rippling pond.   The sun was yellow.   The boat-days are still bright for me, and I think,  it would have been so good if poor Edward could have been there  and had known that kind of peace.   It makes me sad, thinking of his short life’s irritations and his too-hot feet.

       Winter’s night.  I walk with my lover through a field of rotting cabbages.   Dank seedy rows like carious teeth.   And this dark night is also past.   My lover has become ‘the man’.   The man is nameless.   A far-off continent of darkness to which I have ascribed a function, erasing individuality.

       Now Spring.   The man’s walked out on me.   A curling lip, a snarl, a rough eye.  ‘Love’,  he slurs with contempt, spitting a gob of phlegm,  boasting of the mistresses he’s had.   ‘Love!   You believed what you wanted to believe’.    And me,  unable to eat.   I just can’t swallow.   Swelling of my throat, coldness of the words, coldness of alone.  Hunched and bunched with grief.  Rocking and aching with it.  The shock of sudden seeing.   Bleakness of now and ugliness of our past.   Nothing to go back to.   Not even a dream.

       My cold studio room.   I put on the fire and out from some corner of it runs a spider.   Hideous dark elbowed angularity,  the legs fur- textured.   I leap in shock and the spider runs back again into some hidden crack in the fireplace.   Then in endless succession it’s back and away and back and away.   Till it’s me who moves  off.    A sense of horror is added to despair.

       Each night,  the same thing.   I’m sitting in the studio-room with this new loneliness.   Strange that all familiar things like the table,  the chair, and the bed seem to mirror the hostility of ‘the man’.   No warmth anywhere. I light the gas and the flames spurt casting yellow-blue light.   The spider comes out of its hole to dance.   Shivery spiderlegs dry as ash.  Suddenly it runs forward,  towards me.   I scream,  it rushes back.  Then the dance as it throws off its agony of heat.   Poor spider.  Life a twin-terrored misery of me and the fire.   I pace the room. It’s freezing in here now.   I’ve turned the fire off to let the spider sleep.

       You know,  I’ve decided that this spider is my companion in pain, and I’m going to call him Edward from now on.   Here we are again, the two of us.   Despair-dark of night.   I feel hollow.   On the hearth Edward leaps because the fire is on.   I’m restless and I stand up.   Edward darts to his hot-hole at the back of the grate. Now he’s  ‘Edward’  he’s less horrific to me.   Yes, my affection is definitely  increasing, and there’s an elegance to the name that makes it easier to see him as attractive.   The good feelings I started to have about Edward have persisted.   Sometimes, unexpectedly,  I’ll burst out laughing,  thinking about him, and he’s still  an emotional contact for me.   It’s curious that it should turn out to be a world in which a spider is carried to the future in my heart and a lover is lost.

       The end of that March bringing its trail of phonecalls.   Voice  of ‘the man’.   He’s saying,  ‘I love you.   Can’t imagine a future without  you.    And my  own voice wails out,   ‘Where are you?  This is the future’.  He goes silent, or maybe follows my words with,  ‘I don’t know what I’m doing’.   The phone goes dead. More pain.

       But I catch sight of Edward.   The tremorous frame, furry, the darting spiderlegs.   So strange, this spider-creature now my only link with life and emotion.   In the wave-rocking agony, Edward, bringing flecks of warmth.   And if I go over to him he’ll be off, poor wretch.   I cry and laugh and cry.

       At the end of the trail, the man.   A night-cabbage in my bed. Impression of damp leaves flapping, of crinkled crevices, of sag. And his voice telling me about true love, how he’d lost then found his way. A shining knight.  Tales of magic and destiny in which he is always the hero.  A million words in his overblown vocabulary of self- admiration that all just miss the point.

       In the morning, seeing the cobwebs round the fireplace he clucks his tongue.   In me a sense of pride, of shyness, as I start to tell him about the spider.   How I’d coped with him and protected him.   How we’d been two souls together in the emptiness. The man understands nothing, doesn’t even listen.   His eyes are fast away to the cobwebs and to some internal picture of himself as hero.

       Edward comes out of the fire when the man puts it on and the man stamps on him.   The shout I come out with to stop the murder produces no flicker in his hero’s fixed smile.   He’s already posing by the fireplace as though for a photograph, his left arm laconic along the rim, his head held sideways enough to catch himself in the mirror.   Discoloured streakiness of his eyes, soft-fatty body corpulence,   and this lacerated flyblown geniality.

       He has the dead spider in a tissue in his other hand, at last throwing it into a bin.   ‘What could you possibly do without me?’ the confident swaying of his body proclaims.  He’s disgustingly unaware of my antagonism and disapproval.   I am afraid of spiders, he has saved me.  All there is to it.  But who knows?  He may, unconsciously, have assimilated my censure, a crime which he would certainly hold against me to justify some future betrayal.  It never will be known, because just a while afterwards, I move out myself.

       And this man, unnamed in my heart, has lost all social and spiritual identity.   He’s only a repository for ill vapours, a ground for decomposing waste.   All evils may be flung to him for absorption. But the despised and fragile one, Edward, lives on, a character in history.   He’s a crystallisation of good and a meek inheritor, yes, and a light furry straggle of a creature who did no harm.

       And me, I sail new boats in a world where paint peels, where the sun may not shine today or the wind might be too high. Such imperfections and uncertainty are the conditions which seem to suit me.