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

     I know where I should be: somewhere else; not here. Circumstance, and there is nothing else, prevents it, but I should be where time crosses diagonally to events, where I am only my own beginning, and not inevitably, my own end. Even before the window was closed in, I realized that points of arrival or departure no longer exist here, only the movements between. Space has no basis in a point. Nothing begins. If the points were found I could go back through all the stage of, for instance, whatever it was that covered the window. This would cause a sense of past, or more important, of possibility. Yet this eliminates possibilities rather than introduces them.

     What stops me from imagining what’s really going to happen? Nothing. Here in the presence of the past and my already lived and contained future, all my intelligences must avoid overlapping. I have known that we will miss the star, will not, in face, pass even near the other ship, but you two don’t know.

     Without relativity I continue inward only as far as my paced heart. I found no place between the wire and my skin to step off into the dark. You are caused to sleep, I know, yet you couldn’t know that this journey will not, now, end. Nothing here, to do with me, could cause your thought. Do you dream at all? I have no one to tell. Tell me.

     . . . . . Sometimes I used to think this window was really a film loop going round — what glass could resist space? Or couldn’t it just have been a painted panel? I used to spend all my time looking out, though what was there never changed — I mean the stars never moved   I believe they were stars. Then once I saw a tiny green spot there on the window. For the last while it has grown, covering the bottom of the glass (this I documented), then the sides, until there is only a small empty corner at the top. There seemed no reason to write this down, or anything else. My eyes had been focused out so far ahead that it is difficult at first to get used to watching the green mould at such a close distance. Soon it closes in completely. There is nothing less, or more, to watch, now that my eyes are accustomed to it, and of course, it is no darker than it was before. No one else knows of this. The project was overestimated and will have to be abandoned. The distance to earth is now so immense that there is a lasting delay, in fact, only silence between my radio messages.

     The message to the first sleeping man: The dimensionless man is one who determines himself without the relation points of others, and he drifts, having no wires to hold him, as you do. Whether the points are there or not, he is unable to fix on them. Those mechanisms have ruined us, my friend. We will kill ourselves.

     The person it took to know that we would not arrive is the one who prevents us going further. Can it be done? Can it be done? You could only go on without me. How could you know that we would fall into space like a lead weight through the water, instead of rising year by year towards the other ship, towards the star until we breathed its own atmosphere and found instead of fire in our lungs, a light we had not known, and a new world.

     The message to the second sleeping man: That speed that was supposed to rush us forward towards the unbreakable surface of the stars instead has made us slow down so that every detail, every particle, must now be examined minutely and seen and continually seen.

     . . . . . I did not choose to sleep. You, like eyes accustomed to seeing upside down, are now more familiar with those landscapes than these. Are you resigned to the edges of the place where you are now? You can have no life waking, therefore, no life dreaming. You are unobserved and helpless. Suppose a dream is working back to you — a dream of how I came to pass through space and was living out moment by moment the end of the journey, the same as the beginning. It could never find you. It is not your awareness that you’ll sleep forever and never die. There is an awareness though: mine.

     Escape routes: an attempt to construct a dream for them. What prevents me from arriving is that I do not know if I am there. The journey itself is very like the arrival. This journey, the stars, seemed feasible as an extension of what we had known. These distances are governed by “laws” which, while they are not unknown, for this implies they will be known, are not intelligible to me. If there is no solution there can be no puzzle. The journey is in my terms and I have no terms for these stars.

     I am shut out of sleep, and know that you are sleeping. If you are shut out of waking (though it was your choice) why are you not aware of my state and in turn, of my knowledge, that we will not arrive?

     The faster we go, the longer each particle takes to pass. Finally we must move through each molecule as though it were a galaxy and each one will take a century to transverse. Faster and faster we travel, until the stars shall retreat from us at the speed by which we slow down. There I have no terms to talk of it, while I have the terms to think it. I find these dead ends even in the dark. How huge we must have become as we’ve slowed down. The particles of my eyelids should soon be visible. I wonder if I shall feel the thoughts in my mind disperse.

     That something could have been wrong inside the ship had not occurred to me. Once I reached out and crossed the window with my gloved hand but the mould stayed the same. We could have passed the place and not known. We’ve come all this way to find what seems when I say it to you like a darkened room one could enter, constantly.

     What do I recall? Less (much less) than my sleeping companions, and only this incident from my time capsule mind.

     “I am trying to get out; I am trying to get to East Berlin”. It is arranged, he had whispered, but the man who had helped him was as trapped as he had been and made a sign not to come near. “The end imprisons me; here: perhaps even before this. There is no one way to go”. The air was riddled with corridors and they crossed and multiplied. “1 was there, or was I . . . . . still the turning of one or another of the corners would cause me to be in another place. Though I couldn’t remember where I had come from, I could remember that I had been somewhere else”.

     They will be suspicious, sensing that somehow you have dimension. Do not understand them. Then they will not question your behaviour, just so it has no reason in it. I will remain in your mind, as will all this, yet broken somehow so as to not resemble the order of things that necessarily held off those escape routes before. This is all that is available — some version of what was before, yet with cause lifted from it like a skeleton from a fish. However what I tell you will happen. “But is no end guaranteed?” No, that would involve you. The order in those miles has kept you from seeing some greater disorder.

     “But as far as I went in that country, my uniform was recognized. I tore off the buttons, but where they had all worn three buttons, before, now they all wore two, then none, as I did. At last I saw where I was to cross; a simple lane went up over a hill. Though I knew it was too soon, I pretended I thought I was over and turned off into a side road. They knew me there. The hills had been bulldozed over and people stood about in patient gloomy attitudes. What else could I have done? Held the magician accountable for his world as well as mine? Can it be done? No. How should I move in any other medium, knowing no destination? Circumstance. I will follow you. Someone follows me. I repeat:

I have left a strange and dreamless landscape
where nobody comes, that nobody remembers.
In this, his version, he holds up the atmosphere
before me in his hands
like a coat,
And it is impossible to know he sustains me
only in his belief.
The destination lacked only the words required
     to locate it.
Now that I am safely returned
My sight will be carefully restored
And I am guaranteed life among suicides.
Surely there is nothing more that could have been done,
And I will follow those motions
     that I memorized like a lesson
Sometime when the stars were undiscovered
And some place where all thought drifts like smoke
through a chimney in the sky.

     Speed requires duplication. We recur in a pattern nearing simultaneity until at last some barrier breaks and leaves an image of myself in every mile. I could perjure myself in all this. Perhaps I have, as there is no one to tell. I’m no closer now than when I first began. The mould keeps the stars from me, yet I’ve doubted the sight a long time before it grew across the windows. I have to focus my eyes on the glass itself, or the mould — they are really the same. I don’t see the other two. It’s as though I couldn’t turn my head. Only I wait, and by waiting, know that I can destroy this fantasy of possibilities, and break the surface of the star; that I will rise up into its bright clear gas and no longer roam this black and sinking space like a bottle in an endless sea.