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

Xanadu is reached by ghost train. We embark from a plank and scaffold platform swathed in black crèpe, and set off towards the bead curtain with a spider painted on it that disintegrates as we pass through and into the darkness peopled with whoops and chitterings.

     A passenger is saying, ‘Woman has the perfection of a silver sphere. It is not a question of otherness but of complete-within-herselfness. Even failure is contained: a perfect part of a perfect whole.’

     His wife says, ‘Bullshit. We’re here to enjoy ourselves.’

     The train judders and sways from side to side. People shriek as Beelzebub masks pop up with the clatter of an old-fashioned cash register.

     Someone says, ‘Anyhow, how did the johnnie who wrote the Book of Jonah know about whales big enough to swallow you up? D’you get those in the eastern Med, or in the Red Sea, or in the Sea of Galilee?’

     ‘Not when I was stationed there, you didn’t.’

     The train passes through a mesh of tacky cobweb, and the passengers giggle. A banshee howls dutifully. An owl hoots too. Then nothing happens.

     It seems a very long journey for a ghost train. People become restless. Someone says, ‘Time is passing all the time,’ and attributes that observation to Heraclitus. Bons mots are two-a-penny, and are sold in conical blue sugar-paper bags.

     Bob Dylan says, ‘ “Why must the beautiful die?” Stephen Foster said that.’

     We all pile out, rumble-tumble, glad of the fresh air, only to discover that the season is over at Xanadu. The fairy lights have been switched off. The ladies of pleasure have been wrapped in hessian and put into storage. The wide eyes of the merry-go-round horses, no longer suggestive of energy, suggest terror instead.

     ‘So when’s it due to open again?’

     ‘There’s no saying it ever will.’ The janitor, taciturn, kicks an empty Carlsberg can into the detergent-flocked, sluggish water. ‘Never guess that used to be a sacred river, would you? Name of Alf. If you ask me, it was all a mistake from the word go.’

     ‘What - the idea of pleasure?’

     ‘No - the idea of keeping it in a dome, away from other things. Those was the days when someone could go out on a snowy morning and have an epiphany. But what’s that got to do with all this? Still, he saw it coming, dinn’e? “Ancestral voices prophesying war” - he actually said that, said it himself.’

     ‘Everybody’s always saying something. It doesn’t make no difference.’

     ‘Ah, but people used to think it made a difference. That’s what made the difference.’

     ‘Maybe.’