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

 I

The flickering stills of seventy-one.The yellow slant
of West Coast sunlight or the mellowing of celluloid
makes us foreigners in our own childhoods.

The hill-perched house and ourselves shrunk by the decades;
our unseen futures - now our histories - etched faintly over
our faces like ghosts hoaxed onto copper-plates.

Our voices too distant to carry to screen; the medium's
silence complete with the transfer to video. I miss
the projector's clack. We are slightly out of tempo,

a touch too fast. Dad's cine camera never ran true,
and we jerk unnaturally on the crab grass,
playing a game whose rules I have long since forgotten.

In half an hour we will run inside for a pitcher of lemonade.
In half an hour we will watch re-runs of The Lone Ranger.
In half an hour we will graduate, have our own children,

mortgage our own fine patches of crab grass.


1I

There were four of us then: count us, four.
Before we collapsed from points on a square
to a fractured triangle with a central vacuum,

all things - cargo ships, B52s, spouses - sucked in
by the lack of you. Destroyed for not being you.
There's less of you recorded than the rest of us

as if you are prescient, one foot already out the door,
when truth was you were always that bit different,
heading your own way. Your absence could be explained:

you were with your friend Shawn, setting light
to the neighbour's shed, or teaching earwigs to explode,
or eating raw eggs for quarters, or reading philosophy.

We three unlit where your shadow passes over.
Our ambitions stretched no further than jumping
off the garage roof without breaking our tibias.

Your heart lies beating on the grass. No-one sees it.
We are too busy out-dogging the dog, all-foured, or
itching our spines against gravel. Your heart

lies beating, persistent, between our impressions of
Foghorn Leghorn, our impressions of youthful indolence.
We were still immortal then. We had no inkling it could stop.

III

Our father the geologist.The materials scientist.
Our Grand Tour of the National Parks: Yosemite,
Umqua, Glacier, Lassen; places his family could

picnic while he filmed at the edges. He always
starts with us - perhaps to establish scale -
five-second vignettes before the gentle, persistent

pan to the right, his eye drawing him away
to more impressive and permanent features:
outcrops of eroded sedimentary layers, extinct

calderas. With a scientist's lust for taxonomy,
the signs are held steadily in shot: Lake Helen -
Elevation 6162; Snake River Road; Fountain

Paint Pots. But I fast-forward to the next snatch
of the next picnic; fascinated by the glimpses
of us, our clothes, our faces - unfashionable relics

of an era I can't believe we ever lived through.
Two sisters with neck-buttoned smock coats;
two brothers with mop-tops. We look like

the Kennedy children on the funeral newsreel.
Picture search past fumaroles, traffic-halting bears,
moose grazing peninsulas, sequoias, to the single

enduring close-tap: three matching offspring
in cable-knits, riding the prow of a boat as it crosses
Jackson Lake. Nine counts: he raises the lens

and pulls focus back to infinity; to the Grand Tetons.
A gentle, persistent pan to the right. And then a sweep
of the sky, as though he expects a meteor shower.


IV

Because he is filming, there is none of him.
Because she is not, there is some of her.
She doesn't look at the lens. She doesn't smile,

except at us.They will separate soon
but at this point are simply pivoted
on a peak of grievances. And they are already

separated. Because he is filming, and she is in the film.
Mirroring the things she would later weep over:
that there was always some of her, and none of him.

 
V

Between Snake River and Jackson Hole, I was scanning
for the cavalry. In Jackson you could buy cowboy chaps
or Native American beads. There were life-sized carved chiefs

guarding the Drugstore. Suddenly I could see John Wayne
on every corner and over the rim of a milkshake
in the Jackson Hole Hotel I peered through the drift

of station-wagons, aching for sight of some tumble-weed.
This barren stop that half the year is dry as Red-eye
leaving the palate and the other half is the province

of snow-chains and skiers had a clarity that nowhere
repeated. Those wide strident Wyoming roads that
led us away; you'd go eight hours without seeing

another car. Roads so blindingly straight they could
fool you into imagining corners; you'd drift
off the bitumen and plough through the cacti.

No-one would find the wreck for a week. Above the plains,
mountains loomed in the moonlight, counting out their high
lakes; the water retained somehow, almost unbearable.


VI

Rattling back West to our rented base
in a '64 Chevvy, singing. Against the heat,
the eucalyptus scent, the aridity; the fluid

harmony of Green Grow The Rushes O.
Dad turning the fan up to full, the windows gaping,
Mum wafting herself with folded maps we had

driven off and the dust furring our tongues as we sang:
one is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.
Dad stopped not far from the Bay and fixed the radio.


VII

Stripping on Christmas Day. We played
in the buff; heavenly, seasonless California. Mum insisted
on doing a full roast dinner but after two mouthfuls

we ran outside to turn the sprinklers on. We baked
and browned through August, March, November.
Even the most deciduous trees were evergreen.

But that changeless State carries its changes
beneath the crust, and the smallest tremors would find us
rigid under the lintels. At kindergarten, we did quake drills.

We sensed that what seemed always a seamless same
had stored its surprises. For the most part we tried
to forget, live in shorts and sneakers, take advantage

of the heat. But under countless games
of Little League, under our lazy backs or bare feet,
a thousand lost seasons were reaching critical mass.


VIII

We learnt to swim in Strawberry Canyon pool.
Mum favoured the throwing-in method;
doggie paddle as a blind counterpoint

to drowning. We were all of us out of our depth.
My sister does a width entirely submerged,
only her buttocks breaking the surface;

she has to do the width to get the breath.
It was like that the whole way through, breathless,
hilarious, desperate. Our mother learned to dive

that summer; bracing her flimsy heart
with definitions of courage. Beneath her enthusiasm,
the certainty that it was all ending.

And beneath our swimming, our drowning.
And beneath our life, your death. The chill,
the watery suspension of gravity, the depth -

all carried in the glimmer of eight millimetres.
It is all so known to us now. The way a shadow
is distorted on the bottom of a pool, transformed

by the refractive index of water, and by our wakes.