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

It’s early in May and, as I sit on the bus that carries me from the airport at Vantaa towards the outskirts of Helsinki, I begin to think of the slightly skewed trajectory of my journey here. I started out from the island off Wales where I live, crossed a strait, boarded a plane, flew over a sea, and now I’m approaching a port from landwards. The woods I drive through are pale and skeletal and drooped, exhausted from the burden of a snow-shroud that has only recently been lifted; remnants of it still cling to the sere, grey-green grass of the motorway verges, like tatters of dirty white cloth. When I left Ynys Môn the leaves had just come out and the hedges were bright with hawthorn blossoms. I’m moving away from the spring. This is a backwards journey.

   And one place it is taking me, I suddenly realise, is into my past. What I’m looking at is the Canada of my early childhood. The landscape is identical. The pines, birches, poplars and spruce are the forests of Northern Ontario; the outcrops of bare, striated rock are the pre-Cambrian shield that lies beneath them; the myriad lakes whose waters spangle behind the branches could be any one of the thousands that stretch up from Lake Superior to the Hudson Bay. A long forgotten scene returns to me. I’m sitting in a Finnish restaurant in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and my godfather is talking to a woman called Janna while she heaps pancakes onto our plates. All around us there are expatriate Finns: big men, wearing thick, checked shirts and smelling of pine sap from the lumber mill at the bottom of the street where they work. I catch broken snatches of their gruff speech and sometimes it sounds like a different language – twenty-five years later I listen to the people talking beside me on the bus and realise that it was. And as my new world memories settle over a freshly discovered old world, I sense that Finland is becoming something of a paradox. This is a remembered landscape, seen for the first time. Through the windows I catch my initial glimpse of Helsinki on a road sign: Helsinki / Helsingfors. Already, before I have even set eyes on it, the city has also begun to double, to bifurcate, to multiply. There will be at least two Helsinkis here. There will be the Helsinki I find and the one I’m frightened I will lose. Because, as I write this, I realise that this is a forwards journey too – and I don’t know where it will end.

                                             * * * *

For my first week in the city there was nothing but high arched skies and ever expanding sunlight. The days were growing, and if you looked closely you could see the nubbly beginnings of buds on the trees in Kaisaniemi Park. Everyone I spoke to told me I was lucky. Their voices were cautious and restrained, almost whispered, as though they didn’t quite trust the spring, or didn’t want the Northern weather gods to overhear them. The girl in the coffee shop on Etelaesplanadi warned me not to get too comfortable on the tables outside. ‘This won’t last,’ she said. And in the grey of her eyes you could see the possibilities of storms, the chilled immanence of snow.

   But it was hard to believe this. The air was so clear and pellucid, so still, and out of it Helsinki emerged in pristine visions of blue and white. I wandered through the wide, neo-classical spaces of Senate Square, looking up the steps to the Lutheran Cathedral with its verdigris cupola and golden stars, set against the blue of a sky that I sensed was emptier than any I had ever known – a Scandic sky, shot through with refracted tints of frost, haunted by the polar vastnesses beyond. I sat in the Kauppatori, eating Lohi soup and Baltic-sweet herrings, watching the ferries and pleasure cruisers that dwarfed the harbour; iceberg ships that moved eerily slow and took hours to melt out of view. I walked the strangely deserted streets of Katajanokka, flanked by warehouses that now housed freights of restaurant tables, bundles of unused menus, cargoes of coffee cups. The people I did encounter straggled past in ones or twos, their gazes watchful, hibernal, blinking as if they didn’t really believe in the sun.

   It was only when I climbed the hill to Uspenski that I realised I was on an island. A narrow canal snaked slyly below me, marking a separation almost invisible from the street. And as I looked around I could see how the clarity of the air and light, the elegant bulk of the buildings, had left me with a misleading impression of the city’s solidity. From here it became apparent that I was surrounded by a peninsular jumble of water, islands, inlets, bays and headlands; an elusive, fissiparous geography that led the eye in bewildering meanders like a drunken mariner. Helsinki was a slippery, amphibious creature, caught half-way between land and water, stalled between winter and spring.

   Those first nights I lay in my bed in a room above Albertinkatu, waiting for the shadows to thicken into darkness, dreaming lonely island dreams.

                                             * * * *

She arrives during a rain storm. The sound of rain on the roof had taken me by surprise – none had fallen since I moved into the apartment. Running down the street to help her with her bags I notice the light grey dust, that for days has covered the sidewalks, being washed away. She’s huddled in a doorway, the frizzled strawberry of her hair fizzing over the lapels of her coat. Her bag’s bigger than she is. As she clambers up the stairs her right foot splays slightly outward, and this faint tilt will become so familiar that I’ll never see it again. Later, as we walk through the city, I become accustomed to the feel of her shoulder, easing lightly against me as she sways.

   Inside the apartment we start by discussing Helsinki and I end up discovering that she likes red shoes and wears Kermit the Frog green tops in the kitchen; that she buys ten types of cheese instead of one; that her pyjamas are frayed at the bottoms and get caught in the little cleft of her buttocks; that her voice gets deeper and slower when she drinks; that beneath the almost translucent paleness of the skin on her face you can see the delicate, beautiful, amethyst streaks of veins. I don’t know where the Sibelius monument is, but I know she doesn’t like pimentos in olives. She believes bottles of water and tomatoes will prolong her life. She says she loves islands. So the next day we head for Suomenlinna.

   We forget to pay for the ferry and slink guiltily onto some seats at the back. A group of schoolchildren fidget impatiently around us and we mistake the scolding glances of their teachers for those of ferry guards. As we glide through the harbour I prepare to look closely at the features I’ve studied on my map: through the window I should be able to see Luoto, Pikku, then Sarkka and Harakka, and then the manacled islands of the fort itself – Pikku-Musta, Larsi-Mustu, Iso Mustasaari. Its history and alterations are fresh in my mind from the pages of print I’ve read: Sveaberg, the military jewel of the Swedish empire, built in 1748; Viapori, after it was captured by the Russians in 1808; Soumenlinna, when Finland became independent in 1917. This will be part of my planned meditation on Helsinki. I will write about the cusps of empires, Hanseatic aspirations, the frictions between East and West, the ambivalent co-existence of fortress and port. And then the ferry has docked and all that I’ve seen is the way she smoothes her fingers with her thumb when she’s nervous and how her eyes get brighter when she laughs. The Russians took the fort after a lengthy siege, apparently. I’ve learnt how she once auditioned for a play and it was only her hair that got a part.

   On Suomenlinna we wander aimlessly and happy and adrift. On Suomenlinna the barracks have become restaurants and beyond its stone ramparts the grassy knolls are picnic grounds. On Suomenlinna children climb over silent cannons. On Suomenlinna everything is changing.

                                             * * * *

There’s a relic on the wall in the Cosmos restaurant, almost hidden in its renovated, 1930s bohemian gloom. It’s a girl’s red slipper, lying on a slab of dusty, broken pavement, encased in glass. I’m not sure what it’s meant to commemorate. Perhaps it’s the Russian bombing of the city in the war, or the hard, Spartan years afterwards. But even if this is true it remains ambiguous: does it recall the fragility of the city or its resilience? That which was lost or that which survived? Who wore it and what happened to them? Is there a foot it still fits?

   I’ve been speaking with one of my fellow diners about their summer cottage near Savonlinna and our conversation takes us into the Finnish woods. They explain to me how many Finns consider their identity as having been forged and nurtured in the country’s forests, that its language and culture grew and were preserved there – its character an emanation of the lakes and pines – so that their love of nature is also in some measure an affirmation and remembrance of their Finnishness. The summer migration of people from the cities to their cottages in the woods – which by August will leave the streets of Helsinki thinned and partially deserted – thus has a ritual function as well as a leisure one. Their city life is only a half-life, a winter life. The port of Helsinki looks out at the sea and the world, but many of the Finns who live in it believe their authentic selves lie behind them in the north, under the trees.

   Earlier in the day I’d walked through the shaded, spruce-scented avenues of Hietaniemi cemetery, surrounded on each side by rows of gravestones, many of them rough and unhewn as though they were simply outcrops of rock. At the time it hadn’t occurred to me why a cemetery should be placed in a woods, why the church there should appear suddenly through the branches, like a homestead in a fairytale forest clearing. I remembered how in Kaivopuisto I’d been struck by how the park had a feeling of ferality about it; that despite its tended flowerbeds and the cafés and coffee stands that lined the seafront, it had somehow seemed like a piece of remnant wilderness, a primeval revenant, the haunt of woolly mammoths and bison rather than joggers and couples walking their dogs. I’d left the path and climbed over exposed slabs of granite, slipping on their smooth, glacierscraped surfaces, and for a moment time itself had felt as thin as the earth that surrounded this bedrock, as porous and scattered as pine needles. To my right the white walls of the Cathedral shone like cliffs of snow, icy apparitions that the sun would dissolve, leaving only these granite foundations behind. I thought how much of this city was conjured up in the mind of a single man, the architect C. L. Engel, commissioned by a Tsar to raise a capital on a barren peninsular. ‘Finland,’ he would write soon after his arrival, ‘is nothing but a rocky cliff.’ A nothing that he would dream into a city. And I thought of how, as it first took shape, the people must have briefly imagined it an illusion, a necromancer’s spell rising into the skyline, which, if they blinked, would evaporate and reveal the original stones and trees. Habits of mind persist. Maybe some Finns don’t yet quite trust the reality of their city.

                                             * * * *

In Cosmos I eat reindeer, and toast the north with red wine. She’s sitting opposite me and even as I’ve talked to others I’ve wanted to tell her something. But I don’t quite know what it is I want to say. All I know is that something has happened, something has come suddenly into existence. But in Wales too we don’t quite trust what happens suddenly; addled with our long history we doubt that anything without one can be real. But Helsinki is real. It exists. It remains. Outside the restaurant door it is still standing.

                                             * * * *

The Kauppatori is full of orcs and goblins and monsters. They overflow onto Esplanad park, swell the pavements of Unionkatu, and spill into Senate Square. A gigantic host of happy demons, flourishing Finnish flags and singing Hallelujah. Lordi’s triumphant homecoming from the Eurovision song contest has unleashed a Baltic Bacchanal, an ogre-faced version of the Venetian Carnavale, fuelled with Karhu and Koff and heavy metal. Pushing my way through the revellers my feet bump against empty bottles, spinning them across the cobbles.

   For a better view we climb the Cathedral steps and sit looking down at the square. A group of young men are wielding plastic axes around the stone feet of the Tsar. A girl with paper dragon’s wings is slumped against the wall of the senate building. A man sitting to my left tries to get my attention, and from between his cardboard tusks he asks me for a cigarette. Under the columns of the Cathedral a couple jump up and down beside a portable CD player, waving their arms in the air, chanting Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hard Rock Hallelujah. Passers-by stop to join them, and their drunken, pagan hymn rises over the Cathedral’s spires, making me wonder if, inside, the statues of Luther, Melanchthon, and Agricola are frowning.

   Despite the bottles and broken glass that cover the streets, there are no jagged, dangerous edges visible this evening; a soft, communal joy seems to infuse the city. Strangers smile at each other from beneath their masks. Policemen look on indulgently while youths dance on the roofs of tram-stops. Dressed as devils the people act like an extended family of angels – picking up litter in bags, patting each other on the back, sharing drinks, stepping carefully over the drunks in the Esplanad with their matted, Kalevalic beards. Caught up in all this togetherness I manage to lose her briefly in the crowd and find, mixed in with the Karhu there, a sudden pang of loneliness in my stomach.

   Earlier in the day an intimation of this had come over me while we
stood on a dock outside the town of Dalsbruk, a Swedish-speaking town that lies on the island of Kemio, off Finland’s south-western coast. Beyond Kemio a vast archipelago spreads into the Aland sea towards Sweden; an archipelago so numerous, people told me, that in the winter, when the sea freezes over, it was possible to skate all the way to Aland itself. Our hosts, a Finnish writer and his wife, had led us down to the dock through the woods behind their house, and as we’d walked I’d caught glimpses of sails floating between branches, as though they were attached to forest boats. It was hard to tell where the land ended and the water began. And I remembered how the afternoon before, on the bus from Helsinki, I’d almost missed the narrow channel that separated Kemio from the mainland, despite having kept a close watch for it. When we reached the dock it was easy to see how I’d almost missed it. Here, where the land splintered into the archipelago, nothing was definite. Here, near the top of the world, things fell apart. She said she loved islands, but as we stood on the dock I’d imagined the moment when she’d be drawn back towards the slow, sturdy, tectonic reassurances of a mainland life.

   That night we drank Pernod until the sun came up, and then walked along the seafront near Kaivopuisto, holding hands and pretending we didn’t know the way home. And part of me hoped we really didn’t know – that the homes we’d left would not be the same as the ones we’d return to. A few days before, I’d read a story by the Finnish writer, Markus Nummi, in which, to the world’s bafflement, Paris mysteriously disappears. Expeditions are sent out to find it, and one of these expeditions begins to discover it in Helsinki – a spectral city apparently hidden within the precincts of a real one. The members of the expedition start to navigate their way around Helsinki using maps of Paris; enclaves of French speakers crop up in various districts; French customs spring uneasily into use. In Nummi’s story even the most astounding of transformations are possible. And why shouldn’t they be possible, I’d thought, as we walked through the empty streets. If Finland can be the Canada of my past then why shouldn’t time and space be generous and superimpose a future onto this present? If Helsinki can be Helsingfors then why can’t it be Wales as well?

   And as the sun rose higher and the cleaners began to sweep the too substantial streets, I looked out into harbour and saw an island there, a rock scoured clean by the waves, and I knew then what it was I wanted to say to her. Come with me, I wanted to say, come with me to that island. And there will be nothing behind us, no city, no mainland, no country, no continent, and in front of us only the glittering possibility of a sea. This is where we should have started from. This is where we should have reached.