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

     All over England, jumping on and off trains, he sees her vanish round corners, it is never her in any case, it is someone he has invented, a woman’s shape to fit his shape, travelling the same wavelength. He is selfish and at first his only ticket is his ego. Men begin in this way, as do women, some remain so till they die. It is not, he will slowly come to realise, a cosmic welfare state, but a very difficult place wherein the norm is danger, decay, defeat, destruction, death, and anything else beginning with D. As he travels he reads, occasionally glancing at the details of the landscape through the train window, and grapples with inertia, gravity, probability, ignorance, subjectivism, coincidence. It is enough, some days, just to remember who he is, his name and date of birth and other details, and his many destinations.

     In any plot always leave one of the characters out. Especially the one who says I told you so.

     And where is she, who will be his love, and the light to his dark shadow, flesh to his flesh, fire to his skin, and leave her brown odour on him ever after? We shall call her Marjorie. But she won’t be anyway he expects. His act of imagining her defeats itself. She will occupy her own space, and won’t wear shades to impress him or anyone.

     On the train north he is reading a book and trying to understand the theory of relativity. The example given is of a man such as himself on a moving train whose own walking speed is derisory to the speed he and the train together are travelling, without notice. There is, he realises, thinking he glimpses someone who might be her standing with a bicycle at a road barrier, his walking speed as he goes to the buffet car. She was wearing a blue headscarf, a cotton dress, and was instantly gone forever. And there’s the train’s speed, and its relation with his own. Since the buffet car is forward and he is walking in the same direction as the train, is he in fact travelling faster than the train? And when he comes back to his seat with the coffee he believes he needs to counter his bafflement, will he be travelling more slowly? Several young women in the buffet are not her, nothing like her. And then he thinks about the Earth’s rotational speed, its swing around its star, the star’s speed around the axis of the galaxy and away from every other star, and the galactic speed. All of this so far as he can figure becomes a spiral motion. He finds this comforting. He finds the coffee comforting. He returns to his seat, opens up his book and reads we know now that all matter is composed of waves of probability, and tries to imagine that, and falls asleep, and dreams of her again. His non explicit lower body approaches her non explicit lower body. They are fucking at the speed of light, the molecular chains between them break and reform, her face and all the stars a blur, as ever.

     In his dream his cry is a cry falling head over heels through the universe, forever and forever. So far, that is, as he can be said to be falling, so far as anything can fall forever. All the same he is falling, flailing, desperate, no air to carry his cry, no last words from a choking man.

     And in any case how long is forever, brothers and sisters? Not long in this case. Forever with us lasts only till Thursday week, when there will be a complete new dispensation, and with one mighty bound our protagonist will be free. And then it’s Thursday afternoon. He stops falling through the cosmos, and wakes on a hazy Friday noon in summer. He’s sprawled in a deckchair, and has been sleeping in the sun too long, and a thrush is puncturing what would otherwise be urban groan. His sweet peas are in flower. Bees are droning in and out of flowers. The songthrush pleases him. He should be weeding, now he has so much time on his hands. He has been dreaming, and shakes his head to rid it of the dream of an unknown man on a train drinking coffee and then abruptly falling headlong through nothing. He yawns. He gets up from the deckchair. He never drinks coffee.

     He crushes the greenfly on the sweet peas, resolving to squirt them with soapy water. He considers his life. He is an ageing and grumpy man, a widower, a senior ticket clerk in the railway booking office, he smokes rollup tobacco, he enjoys a glass of lager and the occasional cigar, he reads science fiction, enjoys watching cricket, takes a bath once a week, once a year goes to his sister’s in Bognor Regis, eats fish on Fridays even though he’s not a Catholic. He is a man of deeply established habits. He is pleased that his life is in order, and that he’s not falling through the universe in that tedious fashion without any possibility of narrative action or dialogue and nothing to discover there, and he thanks God even the sweet peas and the greenfly have good reasons for being where they are.

     He has no name.

     He sits down to think about this in the deckchair. He thinks about his supper, cod or plaice. He thinks about his approaching retirement. He thinks about his dog, Manilla, asleep in the shadow of the deckchair. He thinks about his dead wife, Marjorie, and his son Peter who never visits. The thrush departs. A cloud briefly crosses the sun. He falls asleep.

     They meet and fall in love, they marry, they have children, they grow old, their children have children, they die. They meet, they fall in love, they don’t marry, don’t have children, or they do. They meet, they are already married, or one of them is, they part. They meet, they are already married, they leave their existing partners, there is grief, guilt, confusion, they marry each other. Or not. Or they lose each other, nonetheless. They meet someone else. They resolve to live alone. They die alone. They die in any case, abruptly, all on the same day, all over the world, huddled like the dead in the boat houses at Herculaneum.

     Too bad.

     He dreams he’s invisible, a common enough dream. He can’t see himself at all, and mistakes doorways for mirrors and wonders why he’s missing. Apparently no one can see him either, except when he’s reflected. Therefore he’s obliged to carry a full length dressmaker’s mirror around with himself. It’s heavy and awkward, and the wheels are stiff, he can’t take it on buses without an argument, and there are respectable hotels that won’t admit him. He worries that if the wind catches his mirror it may break, it might even take someone’s head off. And if the mirror breaks he’ll be nothing but fragmentary reflections flying through space trying to get himself together again. He can’t find a mirror big enough to show him his own ego, Marjorie explains. He resolves to marry her, and beat her with a stick, just in case.

     He dreams of a beach endlessly long where he walks forever (see above) towards Marjorie, who is as when young and he first knew her, and naked. And though she’s far away and he will never reach her, he knows her body is beaded in seaspray, and her notch of curly black hair will be wet and cold to the touch.

     But the beach opens, shifts, divides. The ocean pours down the widening split in the beach. The white cliffs, gulls, blue sky, clouds, shells, harebells, pebbles, seagrass, Marjorie, himself and the whole earth slither in after and he’s falling (forever, etc) through everything.

     And she’s falling away from him. She has shaved her young woman’s pubic hair into a black rose, but it makes no difference. Though Thursday week will come for you and I brothers and sisters, for him all the forms in triplicate and the double entry book keeping will never come out straight. It will never again be Friday nor Bognor Regis nor the zoo on a winter afternoon. Goodbye, Harold,just as we’ve learned your name. We’re going with Marjorie.