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

   Then everything stopped.

   No longer could Lansing feel the hands of his wife and his mother upon his own. Neither could he move his head and this, allied with his now immobile, unblinking eyes, gave the view before him the quality of some strange triptych.

   To the left of his bed sat his mother, head bowed so that he was unable to see her face. She had been stilled just as her other hand was about to grasp his forearm - a few moments before she might lift her head and speak.

   Across from her, his wife might have been a mirror image, save that a little of her nose was visible and that her free hand was clenched in an agony that would soon grow to be near intolerable.

   And straight ahead on the wall of the hospital room, was the centrepiece of this tableau - a clock, huge and tactless in its placement. It had, however, redeemed itself at five forty-five and seven seconds - having graciously stopped at the same moment its viewer had.

   So this was death, thought the dead man.


   Severed from, yet apparently trapped within his own corpse, Lansing was less a spirit being than might be supposed, for he was still subject to the full array of emotions. Like an amputee complaining of pains emanating from a long-gone limb, his former body still coloured his thoughts - though in this case death, and a certain attitude of mind, had given such sensations a deliciously illicit character. Lansing had long thought it probable that his life would end in complete obliteration, thus initially at least, he greeted his psychic survival with the bemused delight of one of those ‘never been lucky’ cynics who had found themselves the winner of a lottery.

   Yet as he continued to stare at the stopped clock he was assailed by terrifying thoughts. What if he lay trapped within an instant; neither truly alive nor dead? How long might he remain so? To him it might seem like an eternity, alive within the moment of his death, pinned upon an infinitely thin but inviolable boundary appropriate to the daydream of a Hawking or an Einstein. Alternatively, perhaps he had instantly been judged and then condemned - the open prison of time having been replaced by a solitary confinement cell.

   He had, of course, no way of knowing how long these musings took, but at their end he had been overwhelmed by a loneliness and self-pity that at length yielded only to grief. For frozen close before him, but utterly inaccessible, were his wife and mother, and he mourned them as if it were they who had died.

   Lansing wished that his eyes had been closed, so that he might lie in darkness and not be constantly reminded of the world he had left behind. Then he began to derive a certain comfort from the scene before him, which, as it were, anchored him to the earth. Like the old test card that used to appear between television transmissions, it seemed to ensure that his mind remained calibrated, and did not drift into the madness of one suspended indefinitely in a sensory deprivation tank.

   He came to know the scene in exquisite detail, and by a great effort of will could concentrate on a particular part of it for vast periods of what was, quite literally, his own time. A principal exercise was to calculate the number of hairs visible on the heads of both his wife and his mother, much in the manner of a prisoner counting the number of bricks in the walls of his cell. In doing this he noticed that each hair had its own, unique colour given it by a certain concentration of pigment and the particular amount of light falling on it from the bulb above. Eventually he was able to look back at a single one and give it its previously assigned number in some inscrutable sequence.

   Part of Lansing wondered why he undertook such a vast and apparently pointless project. It certainly wasn’t to while away the hours and days and years, for how could one take shavings from the seemingly infinite and reduce its weight? Yet impelled to carry on with it he was, and eventually he came to embrace it fully and hopefully - as a disciplining of his psyche and perhaps a preparation for something as yet intangible.

   After this accounting of those things that even the gods had not tabulated, there came the question of his sensibility. He was reviewing his wife’s eyelashes, tormenting himself with their unreachable loveliness, when he considered a droplet that was carried upon the ends of several hairs. He had encountered it in his earlier sweeps, for its minute hall of mirrors had posed problems for the precise calculation of the number of hairs in this exquisite structure. Now though, he was able to see in it something else, something he believed he would never see again. A reflection of his own face.

   He noted the slackness of the jaw and the absurdity of spectacles made redundant by the growing acuity of his disembodied mind, or soul - if such a thing existed. It was this distilled and sharpened remnant of the self that had allowed him to see each individual hair, not the etching of an unchanging scene upon dead eyes.

   Yet by the detail-obsessed standards of his lonely vigil, his face quickly bored him. Deprived of the information imparted by life it was no more interesting than the folds of the bedspread, whose topography he had repeatedly mapped with the dispassionate precision of a spy satellite. Nevertheless, there was life there, though not his own. The focus of his interest was the silvered rim of his glasses, for reflected on to it, perhaps from one of the rings on her hand, was another face - that of his wife.

   He now saw fully and undistorted something that under normal circumstances would merely have been a pink pixel at the edge of his field of vision. In the moments before he had died she had lowered her head, that he mightn’t see the despair upon her face. Ironically, she couldn’t have known that what she had held back from him he might forever remain a prisoner of, for he now believed that during the ages before him he would repeatedly return to it; till that tragic visage bleached all else from his memories of her.

   Once again he wished that he had been plunged into darkness. Then he remembered that he had thought the same upon being confronted by the scene in the hospital room. Just as the counting of hairs, like the chanting of a mantra, had in part freed him, he wondered if within her eyes there lay the key to continuing his journey. There had been occasions in his life when, upon looking into them, he had briefly known that total empathy that went beyond the divining of thoughts and the sharing of feelings. He had always likened the surprise of such a connection to reaching out for a moment and touching someone on a passing train. Now he had as much of a moment as he could have wished for, and he believed he might bridge the gulf between them if he could somehow look for long enough.

   Ignoring the logic that no matter how much he did so it could never for her amount to more than an instant, Lansing concentrated on his wife’s pupils. Imperceptibly, they grew larger - as though wide- eyed it was she who searched for him, and if needs be would take in all the world to find him. Eventually both they and the irises that surrounded them filled his view, and struck him as being like two eclipsed suns whose light would not for long be denied.

   Behind them, though, there lay darkness. Not only was Lansing defined by his isolation, but in the melancholy landscape that stretched ahead of him, it seemed that the living spirit was too. In this vast network of unsigned highways whose junctions added up to the woman he loved, he was the slightest of travellers - less than a memory hidden away in a lifetime; little more than a ship alone in space.

   Yet Lansing now had the patience to search the heavens, and the large numbers that had once been sublime abstractions, he had learnt to conquer one step at a time. So on he travelled, till a single point of light came into view that grew to shine for him like a star, and then like a comet, for it had about it a feeling of arrested movement. Finally he realised that he was looking at a single thought, which as he drew towards it, touched him, tugged at him, and repeated itself over and over again.

   Lansing realised what all his preparations had been for, all the lifetimes within a moment, though still he hesitated before the choice of further cold arithmetic, or a warm and tender oblivion. There was no doubt, though, that in the end he would give himself up to it. As he approached the light, he was filled with a single thought of his own - a response to be repeated again and again, till he ended the journey that had taken him between an instant and an eternity.


   Back in the hospital room the second hand of the clock moved on.

   ‘He’s gone’, said Lansing’s mother, turning to her daughter-in-law.

   Without realising it, the young woman smiled, and in its ineffable beauty this expression was returned in full by her companion - a flash of dawn before the deepening of the night.

   Above them and unnoticed, the clock continued in its unyielding way and the two women began their own bittersweet journey of remembrance for the man they had lost.