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

I am through the swing doors and lurch into the feebly lit car park, fumbling for my cigarettes. Before I light one I take note of the ground. Hard packed gravel, under which lies a thin film of water from an early evening downpour.
 
I scrape off the top surface of the gravel and the murky water stills to reflect the stars and, as I light it, the glow of my cigarette. I drop the match in the miniature lake at my feet and watch it float, pushed by an unseen force.
 
I press my foot hard on the ground and think of my precise location; how the earth spins; how if I press harder I may in some small way influence the earth's axis, be the cause of a minute dent in its vast curvature.
 
This behaviour is not unusual for me. I have done this since I was a child and my father brought home a world globe and I span it through my hands, letting my fingers catch on a continental relief. When it stopped, he would point to where my fingers touched the globe and bark, "That country. Ask me a question, son."
 
I always enjoyed this game and enjoyed it more for knowing that most of the time he took liberties with the answers. "The Russians" he said, lowering his voice into a stage whisper and looking cautiously over each shoulder to check for spies, "the Russians are descended from bears." Or, "Mermaids are known to exist off the coast of Madagascar." Sometimes questionable science would be mixed into the geographical hokum, "If every person in China were to jump up and down at the same time then the earth would shift on its axis a few degrees - England would be as hot as Africa."
 
"But how?" I would ask, stupefied by the thought of the world's movement and its consequences.

"It's just a question of synchronisation, even the population of the Isle of Wight could make a difference."
 
I came to cherish this particular tale - making sure it was told regularly by training my fingers to identify the contours of the Chinese territory and stop the globe in just the right position - and for the rest of my life I've tried to be a one-man China. Stamping my foot, or both feet, in different locations just to see what would happen. And I harbour a secret desire to visit China and make friends with the Chinese. Conduct experiments with whole villages, towns, provinces until the whole country, all one billion of them, was ready to jump. The nearest I got to China was Singapore in 1945 when my carrier was in port for one week and my feet were none too steady on the ground due to an excess of clandestine VJ day beer.
 
It was the combination of the exotic Far East and massive population that snared me into a lifetime of jumping. I never had any desire to enrol the population of the Isle of Wight in my plans.

One foot down, two, hard jumps, soft jumps, softer now my knees are less flexible... nothing has ever happened. No perceptible shift, no shaking or rumbling of ground, just continuity.
 
My wife, my sons, do not know of my obsession and if I'm ever caught stamping my feet I just mutter, "Poor circulation." If I were to share this obsession, with a doctor in this hospital, would I now be sharing space with my son? Maybe, taking his place? I would readily take his place.
 
I drop my cigarette end into the puddle. It is cold now and I fold my jacket around my body and pull my hat down until it crushes my ears. Then a tap on the ground with my heel followed by a sharp look at the sky.
 
But the stars remain in place, sometimes there, sometimes obscured by cloud and the only flash in the sky is from car headlights crawling along the hospital entrance road.
 
When I visited yesterday, I stood for a moment in the ward reception and watched the nurses through the windows. When no one was looking I jumped into the air and brought both feet crashing down. My knees held out but the nurses didn't hesitate in their work and the hum of hospital noise from behind the partitioning remained at the same apologetic level. I glanced through the French windows but the sky hadn't fallen and the trickle of October sun remained weak and ineffective. I know how it feels.
 
Those windows remind me of a similar pair in my music teacher's house. An inharmonious place of faltering scales and clicking metronomes. But I persevered with damp reeds, arpeggios and sticking keys and, between my father's death and my going into the navy, I wrote music for the clarinet. Boogie Woogie Concerto was its grand title and I suppose it was an extension of my lofty ambition to be Benny Goodman. I can't be sure now if I ever played it all the way through by the time my call up papers came in 1944. I can't remember. But my ambitious title for the piece reminds me of my son's poems, carefully scripted in an A4 dark red cloth-bound notebook with such titles as Heartbeat and Fragile. I've never read them, just surreptitiously scanned the index page. I stopped myself from going further as it felt too personal and to have done that, to have studied the rhyme and metre, would have provided a connection neither of us wanted to make, and one I was afraid to make.
 
"Imagine that, Dennis Stevens a composer!" My whisper into the cold night air steams and outlines some sort of musical notation that disappears as quickly as it formed. My eyes are watery.
 
Other people are in the car park now, drifting, faces blurred into one amorphous mass by the amber lighting. Some shapes I recognise, other visitors who have followed the thick green line that steers them to the ward. Others who have stood waiting for sons, daughters, uncles, fathers to be brought to them; who have nodded and smiled to me in the visitors' cafe. Smiles and nods that say, "We know."
 
Sometimes, as I sit at the Formica table in the ward and try to engage my son, I press my knees together and feel the bone and muscle slide and knot against each other. I wonder if his limbs feel the same. Perhaps we have a connection through the force of cartilage and muscle, pulling and correcting the bone in the same direction. But then I look at my son's face, screwed towards the scrabble board and try to gauge the similarity. There is none, at this moment of deep mental crisis, none to note or speak of. I feel my body collapsing.
 
One time I resolved to tell him of my compelling desire to jump and move the earth. Of course I fumbled it and, when the words, "Sometimes I jump" slipped from my lips, the look on my son's face was neither intrigued nor incredulous, just blank. I fudged the rest of the sentence and concentrated on a double-word score.

So, once I wanted to press all my weight into the earth, make it burden my weight. Now all that has changed and I am here in this car park, a cold drizzle beginning to fall and the weight of the earth upon me. I didn't expect this reverse and don't like it.
 
But inside that brooding Victorian building he spends his days sat upon an iron bed under the constant flicker of an observation light. My son weighed down to a standstill, unable to contemplate a movement forward let alone the lifting of both feet from the ground.
 
"I feel my age," I say towards the sky. It is now 1985 and in the way of things this should be my decline and my son's moment of increasing confidence and maturity. At the age he is now I was standing on the teak deck of an aircraft carrier, on a sticky midnight watch, with the hum of the ship and swish of Pacific my only accompaniment. Or below decks, crowding isobars onto weather charts as above me the steam catapult zinged and shuddered and drummed the steel bulkhead. At action stations, standing next to the pom-pom gun and seeing the tracers scribe the sky and rattle the bones of the crew as kamikazes whizzed and whined.
 
All the time a rhythm, beat and syncopation. And after lights out, after cocoa and rum, I would stare at the ceiling and dream of scoring lined paper with Tin Pan Alley tunes. Thinking of Bix, Harry, and Glenn while playing an imaginary clarinet - Benny Goodman style. The World was shifting on its axis enough at that time without my help and my jumping was off limits for the duration.
 
It was the thought of music that kept me going and fuelled my imagination... when did I last buy, play, a record? 1955? 1961? Jazz and Swing have long gone but the jumping made a post-war reappearance...on the factory floor at work, in the garage at home, on the train station, in the street, shops, pubs. An ongoing experiment, without notes and papers and with no success, to tilt the World's axis. A last connection to my father that unlike his photos and death certificate has not faded and curled to dust.
 
But what of my son? What has happened to his future dreams and aspirations? My feet are cold and I genuinely stamp them to generate some warmth as I watch a new couple enter the hospital doors and hesitantly talk to the receptionist through cracked and embarrassed smiles. They are frightened by this place, scared of what has become of the person that waits for them inside.
 
I stare down at the puddle, see a brief reflection of my father, my globe, myself, and then drag the gravel back over the surface. I jump high and both my feet smash down on the ground and I stare at the sky, the trees, the hospital buildings. Nothing is changed, nothing is moved. I am 60 years old and it is 50 years since my father gave me that globe, and I spun it and he spun his tall tales.
 
Time to forget, father, time to consign the jumping to the past and think of the future, my son's future. My son, sitting humped and quiet in a hard to heat high-ceilinged observation ward, deserves a steadiness and two-footed approach that I know I can give him.

I follow the green line back to his ward and watch him drinking tea. Outside the rain has increased and beats a nice comforting pulse against the grimy panes of glass.
 
I remember that I once stopped the globe and pointed to a small speck in the wide Pacific.
 
"That island is paradise," said my father.

"How do you get there?"
 
"Oh, you'll know when you find it, son ... you'll know."
 
I enter the ward and pour myself a cup of tea. I put the drink on the table next to my son's elbow and the sparsely covered Scrabble board. I place my hand on my son's shoulder feeling the tight muscle and tense flesh under his thin cotton shirt and say, "Son."
 
There is warmth from both of us, transferring, flowing through our bodies. Both my feet remain firmly on the ground.