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

(A)   “...nothing seemed real or true…”

UPSTAIRS AND downstairs his feet echoed in every empty room. Each stick of furniture had been sold. The ‘For Sale’ sign had gone up in the front garden. Downstairs in the breakfast room a last small pile of rubbish waited to be shovelled into bin bags. It was a bright clear evening. The stars were out. In all the rooms he entered he switched on the lights and waited, trying to recapture whatever had taken place between those four walls, anything that he could snatch back from the maw of time.

     But nothing came to mind, nothing at all. This seemed ridiculous: surely there must be something he could latch on to? But it was as if he had never lived there; the life that filled up those rooms stayed mute, unrecoverable. These bare walls, this fading wallpaper, the scuffed wooden floors - it was was as if he were seeing them for the first time, untouched by any associations. He turned the last light off, after looking down into the garden, which he could not recognise despite the light from the moon, and went downstairs. No clock ticked, no sound penetrated from outside. He couldn’t even hear his breath. He stared at the pile of rubbish. That was it then, all that was left: only this heap of junk, the wreckage of several lives. The chaos of the past had disappeared and the present was just an emptiness waiting to be filled.

(B)   “...in the grave my son, in the bloody grave…”

A FRAGMENT of the dream stayed in his head. Walking in a vast, dense South German forest. Tall straight pines very close together. Letting in hardly any light. A wind whispering above. He was walking with R, their feet sinking into a mush of eaves and moss. R talking on and on about poetry. But even there in the dream he knew that R was dead. Even so, when he woke, he was grateful that they’d had this last conversation, although he couldn’t remember anything that R had said.

     He got out of bed and looked down into the garden where birds - chaffinches, greenfinches, blue tits - were being busy. R had liked birds. But he wouldn’t see them any more. And there would be no more talks about poetry. At R’s Humanist funeral he’d read one of R’s last poems and then watched the brown coffin being lowered into its cleanly dug hole. There was no stone then, just the hole. He had never returned to that cemetery to see what had been inscribed on R’s gravestone.

(C)   “...you either bloody are or you aren’t…”

THAT MORNING there was just a postcard mixed in with all the junk mail that had fallen through the letterbox. He went into the kitchen, threw the card on the table, made a cup of coffee, then sat down. He knew the handwriting too well. “Make up your mind,” she’d written, “either you want to be with me or you don’t. I can’t decide for you...” Was it that simple? he wondered. He’d never found anything to be that straightforward. “I feel there is living to be done,” she went on, “which is a good deal more important at least to me, if not to you...” Well, that was one way of looking at it. But we do all have to swim in the same water.

     Later he put the card in his pocket and went out. All day he felt as if he were wading through mud. He looked at the faces of those who walked past him, but they seemed untroubled, It was eight in the evening when he got back to the house. In the kitchen again, he took the postcard from his pocket, read it once more, then held it for a while in his hand. The picture on the other side showed a view of the Pulteney Bridge, Bath. Nothing was as simple, he thought, as her words seemed to suggest. “Living to be done,” he quoted to himself. But that was just the problem: ‘living’ involved all kinds of other matters. He sighed, then dropped the postcard into the waste bin. That seemed to be the only answer for right now. Tomorrow, when he went on living, there would probably be many others.

3(D)   “...everything eventually becomes illegible…”

A BRICK wall in the rain. A garden behind it. Someone had scrawled graffiti in chalk on the brickwork. Quite large letters too, but now they were almost impossible to read. He tried to make out the words but the rain was quickly washing away what little was left. He watched the remains of an ‘e’ losing its outline, smearing downwards until it was just a faint whiteish blur, a mere hint of what had once been, like an old memory eluding recapture.