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

Mike Foreman

     Birds.

     Oh yes, you admire our plumage; though whether you commonly recognise in the black of the crow a variety of tint to rival the display of the rainbow rosella I take leave to doubt. Not that it is a question of sensitivity or its lack, but rather that your sensitivities lean to the subtractive: that you can comfortably separate colour from function, function from aspiration. You can, in a word, admire us when we are dead; and that is something with which we have difficulty.

     Difficulty. It is not astonishing when our origins differ so sharply. Our first cells divide and multiply not swaddled in the blood-throb of a gently clenched womb but poised within a perfect hard calcium geometry, pre-existent in its dimensions, pale as the sky and seemingly as remote: a bounded universe which, rather than its growing to accommodate our growth, we find ourselves inexorably filling until only by an act of violence, violence of beak and claw, can we miraculously reverse that primal geometry to find ourselves on the outside of the egg of the world. That is why we constantly spread our wings towards the unreachable heavens: for what is heaven if not the pre-natal projected into the unattainable? It is also, perhaps, why every transition in our lives, indeed it must seem to you our every act, is marked by that violence, that abruptness, that property of the irrevocable. Once we have taken courage to launch ourselves from the nest, we never return to it. The kill is instantaneous; digestion unhindered by scruple.

     Conceivably a bias towards geometry supplies the clue to another of our preferences: why, rather than paddle on flat planes, we most of us will seek the longest and narrowest of extrusions on which to balance for roost and respite. Telegraph wires offer an approximation to the pure conceptual union of the one-dimensional with the infinite; and such things please us: Cantor and Schröder falling within our clutches. But for you, on the whole, it is otherwise. Your responses to geometry extend scarcely beyond awe at brute repetition: a Cyclopean colonnade, for example, or the sublime perspectives of tower and barrack in the layout of a Lager.

     Hear us twitter and think the worse of us for it, or at best be amazed at our congregation, the loudness of one tree, a poplar at eventide, grist to the mill of your sentiments. Surely, you think in your less effusive moments, we would enjoy greater kinship with you if we were to roar with anger or purr with contentment or murmur with erotic arousal. That we do not reflects, you suppose, a want of warmth or of sincerity. Our emotions and our communions are transformed, as you understand it, which is to say in some wise translated, from the expression natural to them into the pure arithmetic of melody. But there is no translation implied. For us, music is the measure of all things internal as well as external; and to re-absorb this music into the pattern of your own responses is to misrepresent it. We do not sing Tove ist tot, though some of us may manage Tel-Quel, Tel-Quel, or Oulipo, Oulipo, Oulipo. Yours is the world of Tannhäuser and of St Ignatius Loyola and of torchlight processions reflected in broad waterways; ours that of Pythagoras, of Josipovici, of Robespierre. Our sufferings parade in glorious raiment. You would never recognise them as sufferings at all.

     In truth you envy us. That is the crux. From beehive tomb to midget submarine and to space capsule, you have sought to replicate a situation you never enjoyed, have sought solace in a memory that was never your own in the first place but whose wonder you faintly apprehended: the excruciating beauty of that pale curvature beyond which is nothing: the egg. For us, our coming into the world entails a topological absurdity so total that we are left with no choice but to repudiate it: the absurdity of an inversion of space which in principle could be accomplished only through the mediacy of another dimension. But to you this is eternally fascinating, since it promises ingress to mysteries you cannot guess at.

     Of course, you will deny it. You will continue to shoot us in our hundreds and net us in our thousands, and will try through excess - at which you excel - to eradicate your own fascination with us. But it remains undeniable that no human has ever been able to visualise an angel except with wings.

Mike Foreman