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

Stone lifted his head and stared into the sun until his mind began to swim. When he lowered his eyes to the yellow dust of the road he saw again the red visions, and enjoyed the sensation of weakness which followed, the reeling of all his senses in the ensuing darkness. He walked on through the dust while his head cleared and his eyes began to focus again. There had been a time when only to glance at the sun had brought a rush of tears to his eyes.

     ‘And even so,’ he said aloud to himself, ‘it doesn’t signify. All those lessons, all those silences, all those disciplines and exercises, those austerities and two years of drifting, quiet days haven’t altered the grasshopper soul.’ He was laughing, nodding in agreement with himself, and watching himself nod. ‘Such a pity after all the mystic dreams, the idea that there was no need to live any more, to go about and do things and make mistakes. No, the grasshopper soul. And no thanks to Buddha and the others for offering me a wheel I just have to try and turn. “You cannot turn the wheel on which you turn.” But you can, you know.’

     He stabbed his staff into the dust and walked faster. He had not eaten for over twenty-four hours. He could go for thirty-six hours now without the beginning of headache. He had taught hunger that much.

     ‘But for what?’ he said, shaking his head. ‘A room full of people, demonstrating, explaining. You feel it’s only worth while having achieved these little masteries if you can create an impression with them, which no doubt you’ll do when you get back. Which is why you’re pulling out, which means you know about it, which means you’ve grown up that much anyway, which means you can t conquer vanity. So it’s right to go.’ He sighed, as if satisfied, a long, slow sigh, a certain amount of sorrow in it for this departure, the sorrow already drowning in the sense of space and its millions of ciphers of adventure open to him. He was free again.

     The dusty road from Kaprola to Andwar was straight, running to the horizon like a yellow line drawn with a ruler on the baked brown plain. Far away on the right, powdery and blue with distance, was a jumbled sprawl of mountains.

     The long rough road would be the work of some long dead sahib who must have camped beside it at night in his tent, pipe in mouth, sweat on his moustache, fretting over some far woman or the threat of the Czar in Central Asia while his Indian labourers sat over fires some distance away and carried on their chain of talk handed down from a million generations. Gone now, buried somewhere, that sahib, utterly forgotten, his rupees spent and his labourers consumed in their various cremation fires, their ashes sent racing on the rivers to the ocean.

     ‘We’ll call him Major Brown,’ Stone said, seeing the major, a short, fat irascible and devoted man who had drawn this straight line on the plain and vanished. He would have worn one of those old-fashioned sun helmets, a white sweaty shirt, khaki shorts and stockings and heavy shoes. He would have read his quota of books and newspapers by the light of a hurricane lamp in his tent. He would have had great plans for living, enjoyed some of them, and had vanished.

     ‘Well, thanks for the road, majah,’ Stone shouted to the horizon, remembering how he had fondled the English accent with his mind in one or two Limey air-force messes. The roads and the sea lanes were all made, by the Browns, and now it was somebody else’s turn to use them, for the transportation of wheat, juke-boxes, guided missiles, horror comics and medicine. He was laughing again, some jazz throbbing in his head, hundreds of swift scenes quivering on his screen, pieces of plans for living forming as he walked.

     ‘Here you are, Stone,’ he said, ‘walking along this road and away from the ashram where you’ve been playing spiritual games of retreat, and you’ve been harmless. Now you’re walking outwards again into people’s lives.’

     There were people out there with whom he would become involved, people he had never met, millions of chances waiting for him, all the chains and webs of circumstance awaiting him. In a year from now, perhaps, he would be messing up somebody’s life, or having his own messed up. He had walked out of all that two years ago, shaking with alcohol, and now he was as hard as a board, walking back for more.

     ‘And you’re very glad, Stone,’ he said ‘Very glad. Not for you the little bell ringing in the evening, the big peace, the hammering on the unopenable door inside. Just now, this minute, on Major Brown’s road, you’re in between all that crushing peace of the ashram where you arrived with so many little phony sickly ideas about the mysterious East, and another pattern of mess, which is living, awaiting you. And you haven’t changed all that much. We’ll take ourselves into a bar in Delhi and have a drink and see what happens.

     Still, it was a pity he had not been cut out for the life of the ashram. It had not been one of those places full of self-conscious aspirants for sainthood, chelas with no brains kneeling before half-baked gurus. Americans like himself, particularly women, had caused a rash of such phony ashrams just after the war. No, the place he had just walked out of had been a place of happiness, providing you could stand the peace and the retreat and the utter loneliness.

     ‘We couldn’t take it, could we, Stone?’ he said. ‘And we’re glad.’

     He was a moving speck on the vast plain. The sun was raging above him and little puffs of yellow dust came up about his sandals. He knew he had become too obsessed with himself in the peace of the ashram. He was like an actor, always rehearsing his part, never himself, the running, elusive self he had not been able to catch despite two years of hard discipline and quiet habit. On this plain he felt like a small fragment moving slowly towards millions of other fragments, people, the tumbling human river of the world which he had imagined he could cancel. He was moving back into the stream, and he thought of all who were yet to come, the billions of the unborn who were dammed up in the future, waiting for men and women to come and involve them in the mystery of the world.

     ‘Providing,’ he said, ‘that somewhere, some night, some Joe who has the right of entrance to the cellars where they keep the control-panels, doesn’t have a few drinks, while feeling depressed, and says to himself, “How about a ration of concentrated eternity all round?” They’re all tired waiting.’ A rain of fire. A wilderness. Ash.

     That was another thing about sitting in the ashram. Not being able to forget the maniacs still saying, ‘My Daddy’s bigger than your Daddy’, only this time Daddy stank of the grave and had a million megatons packed in his shroud. Real retreat and real conquest would be to sit in the ashram and not care, let them get on with it. Blow everything to atoms and not care. He knew he wanted to get out into the world again and start worrying, living, suffering.

     The sun burned pleasantly on his ash-smeared flesh and the thick dust flowed coolly between his toes with each step.

     Yesterday had been the anniversary of his being blown out of his exploding bomber over Germany, being hurled through the sky, his parachute opening and then the drift down past the flaming wreckage of his Doom 29. He had stared out through wire for a time after that, until Hitler took out his little gun and went through the long-delayed action, his real destiny in a cellar. Then, liberation and a million drinks all over Europe and America, and finally the mysterious East.

     ‘I’m the mysterious East,’ he said to the dust at his feet. ‘There’s no need to get behind walls to hide. We’re all in hiding all our lives, well inside the real walls we walk about in. This itching flesh.’ He gripped his chest, his belly, his thigh, with his left hand.

     Another speck had been moving towards him for some time on the straight road, becoming an old man as the two specks neared each other. Stone could see the gnarled old hands, the white hair and the thin brown legs a long way off. The old man was carrying a bundle. He would be on his way to pester Bhagat Ram at the ashram with some unanswerable questions about his life and his mystery, and Bhagat Ram would send him away happy.

     He greeted the old man, a peasant with honest dark eyes which searched the tall sunburned ash-smeared figure standing before him. He asked Stone to bless him, calling him saddhuji.

     ‘I’m no saddhu,’ Stone said, laughing. ‘I wanted to be, but it was a mistake, Babuji. I’m a wanderer, going home.’

     ‘Where is home?’ the old man asked him gravely.

     Now where was home? He had never thought of that before, not even during the thousands of silent hours in the ashram.

     ‘I don’t know, Babuji,’ he said, still laughing. He would probably make one in the end, a big box full of trash, mail pouring through the door, and run up bills, and join organizations. ‘So I can’t bless you, Babuji,’ he went on, laying his hand on the frail hot brown shoulder of the old man.

     ‘Trying is holy,’ the old man said, smiling, a little flicker of honest cunning in his wrinkled eyes, perhaps remembering all the deals made with God after each disaster in the village on the sweltering plain. ‘You have tried to be a saddhu?’

     ‘I have.’

     The old man asked him how old he was, was his father alive, did he have children or a wife, how much money had he in the bank, had he ever been seriously ill, and where was he going now if he had no home, the usual friendly questions asked on the long roads of India between strangers. Stone answered them all carefully and with detail, until the old man was satisfied that he knew something of the man he had met.

     ‘Bless me anyway, saddhuji,’ the old man said. ‘For trying. Trying is good. I’ve never even tried.’ So Stone blessed him solemnly and they parted.

     ‘You may come back to us here,’ Bhagat Ram had told him during their last conversation at the ashram. ‘You say you’re restless. But you may be going out to taste the other life again only to find you don’t want it any more. If you don’t like it, come back and you can be in charge of the vegetable garden. You needn’t go through any more exercises. You’ve done well at them but you don’t seem to want to go any farther ahead.’

     That was true. He had enjoyed the physical ordeals of the asanas, the bone-wrenching effort of the early postures, learning to hold them and to pass on to more difficult instruction of his flesh. But he had never been able to hold down the buzzing fly of his mind. His mind had always been just a little out of reach, in front of him, uncatchable, spinning pictures of interminable thoughts. He could not understand this business of stilling everything into a quiet pool, himself drifting under calm control in the centre of it, utterly withdrawn. He could do marvellous things with his body now, but he had never caught the darting fly of his mind.

     ‘And you’re glad,’ he said as he approached the little police station a few yards off the road.

     The police officer at Andwar was an old friend of Stone’s. He used to take a friend out every week to the ashram to meet the American who was becoming a saddhu.

     He got up from his little desk to shake hands with Stone. ‘Reporting in for the last time,’ Stone said, taking his passport out of the little cloth bag slung on his shoulder. ‘I’m departing into the great materialistic world.’ He sat down on the camp chair brought for him by a sipai. The sipai, a young reverent man in a blue turban with a silver badge, put his hands together in pranam and greeted Stone. They were all men who had had great hopes for Stone’s spiritual mission, for his struggle.

     The inspector, a small, thick set young man wearing medal ribbons of the Burma and Italy campaigns, clicked his tongue.

     ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said. For himself, he wanted an all-American life of washing machines, radios, cinema, a big car, a good doctor within easy reach and money to pay him. He had always thought Stone mad but had admired him for loving India enough to live in an ashram.

     He made a pencilled entry in Stone’s passport and handed it back to him. Stone got up, gently refusing the offer of tea, glad to be able to say, ‘I’m fasting until sundown,’ because he wanted to get to Dwarka’s store before dusk and put on some fresh clothing. He shook hands with the inspector and the three sipais, sorry for the inspector who had so much liked to ask questions about America, who so longed to go to that country and drive about in a big car. The inspector would stay on here, on the vast plain under the sun which came and went each day in a journey of stifling heat across the cloudless sky.

     ‘Write to me from America,’ he said to Stone as he went out on to the road with him. ‘I shall miss you. It was nice to know you were up there at the ashram.’ Stone’s being there at the ashram, a man who had voluntarily thrown aside his motor car and the labour-saving world of health that went with it, had been a comfort to him always, he who fretted here and lived in a small hut with a mud floor which had to be swept of thick dust every few hours. Now Stone was going away, back to the enjoyment of the cinematic world, admitting without saying it that that was the right place to be. He was depressed when he went back into the police station to deal with a case of petty theft in the nearby village.

     When Stone reached the village and passed through it to Dwarka’s store at the far end, the shopkeepers waved to him and he waved back, many offering him tea. He told them he was fasting. They were all his friends and he was leaving them. He wanted to go without saying goodbye, without question and answer. Only now as he entered Dwarka’s store could he feel the real sorrow of going seeping into his plans. He knew he would miss this place and these people, and all of India, the land which was really mother if you wanted her. You could kneel down and worship a Cadillac in the street and no one would call the police. You could have a talk about anything on this earth, or out of it, and not be thought dangerous, or strange. Anything could happen, and anything was expected.

     Dwarka, who was making pranam with his small, fine, brown hands as Stone made his, believed in Atlantis, in the Christian heaven, that television had been used in ancient times, and that thousands of years ago men had looked down on India from flying machines. He believed that there had been a terrible fall and that the genius of man had been poisoned by it with violence, and that never again could he make that perfect world he had lived in before the fall. Now, after the fall, man was cursed by his passions, a creature of blood and lust and imperfect thought. He was grieved to hear that Stone was going away.

     He was a small, intense, wiry man with large, piercing eyes, badly in need of spectacles from the reading of thousands of books in poor, flickering artificial light after selling oil, grain, rice, cigarettes and cloth from dawn until dusk. He had a thick mop of dry, black hair. He took hold of Stone’s wrists and said how sorry he was that his friend had decided to go away.

     ‘But why?’ he said several times. ‘Why must you go? You’ve done so well.’ He had often told Stone about another of his friends, an Irishman, a middle-aged retired Colonel, who had become a saddhu and who was now in the Himalayas somewhere in charge of a school of music. This Colonel had begged his way back and forth across India for three years, stopping at Dwarka’s store for long nights of talk during his journeys. He, Dwarka, had been sure that Stone would find the right way at the ashram.

     ‘There is no right way for some of us, Dwarka,’ Stone told him as he sat down on a sack of lentils. ‘Some of us have to get mangled by living instead, before we learn.’ He gave out a string of shoddy explanations and conjectures about man s lot, laughing as he listened to himself, thinking ‘I must be just a purely physical type. No real mind, nothing but a cloud of grasshoppers flying through my skull. A pity.’

     Dwarka brought him his suitcase, the suitcase with his clothes in it which he had left here two years ago after saying, ‘I have a feeling I’ll be back for them one day.’

     ‘I’ll put a bucket of cold and a bucket of hot in the bathroom,’ Dwarka said, his melancholy eyes staring at the picture of Christ on the wall at the back of his store. Beside it was a picture of Gandhiji. Two giants who had been killed so that the man could get on with his mess in peace. ‘Do you remember the last time you had a bath here and how we talked all night about the soul?’ He smiled at Stone. ‘I shall miss you. We don’t like anybody to go away from here once they have come to us. And when you’ve gone I’ll think of thousands of things I want to ask you. Will you come back?’

     ‘I don’t think so.’

     ‘I’ll make the bath ready,’ Dwarka said. It was silent in the town as the small yellow flickering lamps were lit. Somebody was playing a shahnai, the soft nasal notes of it weaving an unrequitable melancholy. Voices in low talk came and went as people walked home from their work in the bazaar. Somebody coughed and hawked for a long time, and the shahnai player brought the mournful and haunting melody to a low, softly droning end. Hands clapped for a while and the shahnai began again.

     When Dwarka came back and said the bath was ready, Stone stood up.

     ‘Dwarka,’ he said. ‘Do you know what I’ve been thinking about while you were away? I was thinking how I love all this, all this isolation and custom and peace, no machines and no turmoil, and I can’t get it out of my mind that it’s sentimental to think like that. Does everybody want the kind of world they see at the movies?’

     ‘Yes,’ said Dwarka. ‘Everybody wants that.’

     ‘The collection of trash, furniture, pictures, curios, insurance policies, land titles, money, machines. That’s what everybody wants, you say?’

     ‘Yes.’

     ‘That’s what I think too, Dwarka. Only I can’t make my mind up if it’s right or not.’

     ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s right. They’re going to do it,’ Dwarka said, smiling. ‘I’m doing it. That’s why I liked to think of you finished with it all at the ashram. Look at me. I want to make enormous sums of money. And I used to look on you as representing what I would like to be doing, living in the ashram and finished with it all.’ An ironic smile was playing about Dwarka’s shapely lips. They had often argued about sin and atonement, and about how we liked others to atone for us.

     ‘Yes,’ Stone said, staring beyond Dwarka. ‘I know what you mean. It’s nice to know other guys are being good, being holy and steady and passionless. Yes. I can see that.’ He began to laugh and Dwarka joined him and they laughed all the way to the bathroom, where Dwarka left him.

     Stone poured the hot and then the cold water over his ash-dusted skin, feeling the hot skin turning cool under the soap as he lathered himself. He sluiced warm water over his head with the heavy brass lotah Dwarka had given him, his tanned, leathery skin shining all over as he dried himself with the coarse towel. Dwarka had left a pot of mustard oil for him and he rubbed it into his flesh, his nose prickling with pleasure in the bitter, heavy fragrance of the orange-coloured oil. Then he drew on a thin silk vest and a pair of cotton pants. He put on an American shirt for the first time in two years, feeling strange as he tucked it into the sand-coloured Palm Beach trousers. He decided to wear his old sandals until he got to Delhi.

     Dwarka had set out tea and cakes and some samosas on a silver tray. He lifted a bottle of whisky and raised his eyebrows, smiling. He could remember Stone craving for the stuff two years ago, and how he had sniffed it and said, ‘I’d give anything in this world for a drink, but I promised Bhagat Ram.’ In those early days at the ashram, Stone used to come into the village at weekends to listen to local musicians and to fight whisky, always having a bottle of it placed beside him so that he could fight it better. It had taken him six months to give up drinking and not to suffer for it.

     ‘No,’ Stone said, smiling back at Dwarka. ‘Just the tea, thanks all the same.’ While they drank the tea Dwarka talked about Communism and the hydrogen bomb, adding that such a bomb had been invented so that man should at last find out his real size.

     ‘That size,’ said Dwarka, picking up a crumb from the table. ‘That’s his size. But we never knew it until now.’

     ‘And what’ll we do now, Dwarka?’

     ‘Accept our size at last,’ Dwarka smiled. ‘Like you are accepting yours. I know how much you wanted to be a saddhu. You know you can’t be one. Is it giving you pain, knowing that?’

     ‘You wanted me to be a saddhu far more than I did, Dwarka,’ Stone told him, while they laughed. Stone stopped laughing, his eyes thoughtful and clouded. He knew very well that there was no possibility of going everywhere in the world, so why go any further than you’d gone? Why travel at all? Often he had thought that in the ashram, knowing well that that was the whole point of the ashram. An acceptance that wandering and movement meant nothing except a slight change of scene for the senses. You could go nowhere, or everywhere, and everywhere was impossible. He shook his head irritably.

     ‘What time does the Delhi train pull out tonight, Dwarka?’ he said, rolling up the last of his chapatti and eating it.

     Dwarka looked at the clock. ‘In half an hour,’ he said.

     ‘Then it’s farewell, Dwarkaji,’ Stone said, getting up. ‘I was just thinking. Why the hell am I going? Do you know, I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know.’ He felt a sort of despair settling on him. Nothing had happened after all. The two years had done nothing. He had no serenity, no calm, no wisdom. He had to laugh. Dwarka looked concerned, puzzled, but remembered how Stone had always wanted what he called ‘a solution’ to every problem. Dwarka knew for sure that each solution only brought another problem. That was his own devil which pestered him, the problem of problems. He knew he was never going to make large sums of money. ‘You dream all day,’ his wife told him, slowly becoming shrewish with him as time passed. She wanted a big house in Delhi. Dwarka wanted nothing, not even the large sums of money.

     ‘Goodbye, Dwarkaji,’ Stone said. He opened his arms, smiling, and they embraced, slapping each other’s backs with both hands. ‘I couldn’t have done that two years ago,’ Stone was thinking. ‘That’s another thing to tell at cocktail time. How I lost my white, Protestant, American, Anglo-Saxon inhibitions about showing emotion.’ He was feeling sad, though, despite the running commentary in his skull.

     He took the suitcase from Dwarka, looking at the dark, solemn eyes of his friend.

     ‘I have a feeling I will be back here,’ he said. ‘And even if I don’t, I’ll want to come back. Everything I wanted was here, peace, friends, everything. And I’m going. I don’t get it, Dwarka.’

     Dwarka had no theory to offer, no suggestions. He was feeling he had lost his spiritual life now that Stone was going. Stone had been his hopeful pilgrim away from the greedy, pitiful self. But more than that, he was losing his friend who had listened to all his fantasies and his theories of the world.

     ‘Goodbye, Stone Sahib,’ he said, waving his hand, a glow in his eyes. ‘We will write to each other.’

     Halfway down the dark road to the station Stone heard the throb of aircraft engines in the sky. He looked up and saw a row of lights speeding across the scudding clouds in the darkness of the sky. He stood to watch it, a curious feeling of panic coming over him as he thought of the cities, the thousands of beings moving in the streets, and he knew he would hate it again but that he could not do without it, could not go on living away from it. He knew he would be depressed after a month, and that he had left because he could find no point in it. Yet escape had not solved anything. He would drink again, quarrel with people about taxes and politics, get old and die in some room as yet unknown. He knew that human relationships were useless, were born for failure, and he was going back to look for some. He stood still in the hot darkness, watching the lights of the airliner disappear into the Western darkness, various hints and ghosts of his own mystery whispering indecipherable messages into his mind’s ear.

     ‘We have a small mountain of dough in the bank in New York,’ he said to himself, aloud. ‘And some small hills of it in Rome and Paris. We have friends to look up, animals to shoot, games to play, women to hunt. What more do we want?’ He could hear the train far out in the darkness, moving towards him. He picked up his suitcase and began to walk on down the track to the station.

     If he had nothing, no money, he would be shovelling gravel in the rain, or loading sacks of grain on to trains, or queued up for a job somewhere. Hunting for three meals was the only honest occupation. ‘A nice sentimental thought,’ he said as he entered the station.

     The train came roaring in, big steel coaches in a rumbling line slowly halting.

     He climbed up on to the high step of the carriage after his suitcase, sat down on the leather seat in the compartment. Everything was covered with a fine film of dust from the plain. He wrote his name in it with his finger and then crossed it out, the smooth black leather of the seat showing up under his moving hand.

     ‘Like Major Brown,’ he said. ‘A name written and then rubbed out. Gone. I think I need a drink. I think I need a few problems to worry about.’ The train jolted and began to move out of the station.

     He did not know where he was going, or why. He just wanted to get away from where he had been happy and he could not understand it. What deepened his despondency was to know that he would never come back here to Kaprola and the ashram. The peace there had injured him. It had begun to capture him and to enslave him in a feeling of safety.

     ‘What we don’t want at any price is the thing we should want,’ he said. ‘I mean goodness. I was getting good. I wasn’t able to harm anybody or get harmed. So I had to get out.’

     He got up and went to the window, put his head out into the rushing air. ‘Out,’ he shouted. ‘I want to get OUT. I want trouble.’