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

Strom Herd was raised in a beautiful valley called “The Slocan” toward the southeast of British Columbia, by a man he felt was not his father though Strom was latest born to his mother of seven. From the mild unease bred by this common-law father who worked seldom, from his brothers’ and sisters continual waiting, waiting for breakfast, for dinner, to go fishing or to bed. Strom would wander into the warm spring woods or alongside the creeks and examine curiously the underwater birds flitting along the roaring stream beds. He was five years old.

     Because Strom’s family lived deep in the bush on a logging road that hadn’t been used in fifty years, he had no conception as city children do of poverty and riches, of relativities. The family washing machine sat outside except in freezing winter when it resided in the kitchen until its job was done, then was pushed on its off-balance casters into Strom’s bedroom (the bedroom also of Strom’s three brothers, three sisters) so that Strom grew to hate washing machines, carried with him on all his small journeys the odour of laundry, and in his brain popped up often the bushy vision of his sixteen year old sister’s “thinger” which blotted out trees, mountains and clouds making him stumble blindly along familiar trails.

     Old Fenn Mulcher was what city people and tourists would call a hermit just as Strom’s family would be known to sociologists as a ghetto culture surrounded by nature, but the Herds and all the other ghetto cultures in Slocan valley knew he was just plain “Old Fenn.” Strom who is sitting in the huge waiting room surrounded by plate glass, taxis, baggage, and the distant images of Boeing 707’s remembers that Old Fenn always brought the kids candy bars, and his mother would make a big brew of coffee, and Fenn usually stayed for dinner talking to Strom’s “bastard father,” and when Old Fenn disappeared in the twilight, Strom’s “bastard father” would rub his stubbled, ugly face and laugh about the eccentric Old Fenn Mulcher.

     Two stewardii are standing cool and beautiful near the doorway leading outside on the tarmac and Strom tries to calculate from their degree of physical attraction whether they handle short provincial flights or rate trans-atlantic assignments. He looks at his watch: it is 8.05 a.m. “There’s Old Fenn living on the mouth of a huge lake (Slocan Lake), right beside the river coming out of it, and he quarries bedrick for a little water for his garden like an old fool” Strom’s bastard father had said. True, Strom recalls. For a few dollars Old Fenn might have bought a pump and saved much time and labour. Just the same the valley was rather cut off from time and you spent your energies as you wished, and besides, those tiny water rills from nature’s rock grew potatoes the size of a man’s head, turnips as big as your arm . . . . .

     Speakers are barking off times, destinations, and Strom observes the mad conundrum of humanity that occupies airports. Geologists, separating lovers, the sick and dying, a mere boy handcuffed to a plainclothes detective, and all rather anxious, unlike the stewardii who have ceased trembling before so much concrete coming and going. “You created me . . . . . if you’re lucky you created me . . . . . you are the bastard, you are illegitimate . . . . . you are the bastard, my dear bastard father,” Strom had bellowed when he was big enough and the man had rushed toward him at the door, but Strom was already across the toyless yard, laughing, sauntering and into his ’52 Chevrolet where he rolled down the window, and . . . . . “How does it feel to be a parasite all your life, old prick father” . . . . . then he spun gravel toward the Slocan school, learning to learn.

     Well yes, his mother had a share of looks. Perhaps that’s why she spent so much time on her back, Strom thinks, and he silently thanks his mother for that inheritance as a stewardess mobilizes in his direction, her eyes a translucent sheen like mica, and he thrusts the naked stewardess down on her talented backside, but within another carnal second she is out of sight in the ladies washroom. Has he perhaps met her on a previous flight? The initial flight when he was under twenty-one entering the silver tube lined in blue felt, oxygen, had she adjusted his headrest while the world flew away for the first time? lmpossible: ten years have passed; she is at rest, retired at thirty-four, her address is . . . . . suite number 2, Farmers apartments Slocan Valley metropolitan area New York City, New York? . . . . . He stands, assumes an image, the image of a man between six and seven feet, from a distance unnoticeable, but in heavy-threaded suits bell bottoming, a silk vest sheening wealth in diamond knuckles, earrings like a woman womaning hair also golden threads across a man’s back, a jaw large unneedful of beard and without, a pirate from another age? . . . . . a hippy? . . . . . no . . . . . a wealthy hippy? . . . . . well . . . . . someone who can buy off anything, even our prejudices? . . . . . perhaps. This appearance impressive as it is traversing the vast waiting lounge toward the windows facing the runway, allows the private man within to think, despite hideous airplane firmaments, neon and steel fog coruscating his eye.

     Fenn knew the mountains as a over, had wandered slipshod ridges with howling abyss on either side, the radiation of moonlight directing his dreams, yet when he was down again aged sixty-five khaki hermit in Slocan streets he never knew distances. “Wull, it’s a mile or two,” he invariably said even though it might be a whole day journey over several mountains or might be less than half a mile, it was always “a mile or two”  . . . . . but who could laugh at the mountain man when they were his mountains? And Strom would drive from high school to Old Fenn’s and in August evenings chop kindling for the woodshed as big as Fenn’s living quarters while Fenn, approaching seventy, staggered giddily in the garden, mumbling about the winter of ‘58 when he ran out of kindling in April, yet the winter stayed 2 months more, and Fenn wrapped frozen for the duration watched the Slocan river turn to ice.

     Strom’s back is hunched, his hands in pockets, his forehead bent nearly touching the advertisement covered window: he realizes he is about to experience an emotion . . . . . But no, that was not it, it had little to do with emotions . . . . . that lack was what held him leaning here becoming emotional. “8.30 FLIGHT TO AMSTERDAM BOARDING NOW IN LANE 5. ALL PASSENGERS FOR AMSTERDAM AND POINTS EAST REPORT TO LANE 5,” the microphone system booms. He watches a throng of people leap up some clasping tears others yelping, scampers, utterances, lane 5 fills rapidly cemented with clothes and baggage . . . . . is it fear? Maybe he was lucky then, maybe it was a stroke of good fortune, but the question itself seems doubtful to him. Had he mailed in 5 dollars to the mammoth Eastern Canada lottery, so they could build their universal eastern sewage system, then stood stunned in the tiny Slocan post office with the notification of the great prize in his hand and finally wandered between the dead saloon hotels of early 1900 and past the modern gas station, the grade 1 to 12 school, to the river where he looked across at the grey shack and the man in it almost of rock, for a long time? He hauls from his inner vest a plastic buff coloured apparition which looks like a bruised raincoat, shakes it flat on the floor and looks at the lines of longitude, of latitude, which make it appear like a city roadmap. But if you examine one square marked by latitude, longitude, another series of cross-secting lines is visible, and taking Out your microscope, if you choose the smallest square your eyes can perceive . . . . . It is a map of the world, of course . . . . . the world from 1.3 light seconds distant, and it is a montage of the inner inner inner maps pressing their designs upward as you microscope in . . . . .  Oh, it cost him a fortune, all right . . . . . but here it was always at hand . . . . . the world sucking his eye in like gravity until in that last quarter section . . . . . the definition of falling buildings, dogs that don’t bark but always bite, welfare patients fishing the lake blue and visible and across its tiny ebbless surface names he knew, the dotted highway line on the highway he still travels with an old man to bigger cities so they can stand on street corners, streets of cars and jewelry stores, neon fingerprints in the memory.

     Never. It was too hideous to be unreal. Yes, last christmas, Chicago to Tokyo and special Japanese cuisine for the season and it snowed in Chicago then stopped snowing at landing in Tokyo . . . . . to make him feel better? The great memorable drunk New Year n the six-hundred seat multi-vair 2 years ago, 3? and somebody from a football team tripped a stewardii, then a huddle, then a stewardii serving drinks without her heels . . . . .  HEYEEAUGGH HAPPY NEW YEAR . . . . . YEAH MAN YEAH HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY WHOOLAH” . . . . . “THREE CHEERS FOR THE WHORES OF THE JET SET” . . . . . Who said that? What an awful thing to say. Much heavy snoring to follow. A safe and sunny landing in Texas.

     Some wrinkles on the map look like an old man’s forehead. He feels his forehead: it is bare. Quite simply, the prize was immense. The money was put in the bank of his choice. He took out half a million dollars in Canada savings bonds, the rest was current account. And right then he had been considering University, weighing it against stillness, the provinciality of his existence. He was post-Joe Namath and others . . . . . he would fly east, receive the prize and return . . . . . “Uvurry cities the same, thorn all the same, “Old Fern Mulcher had said . . . . . and perhaps he knew the outside world through Fenn’s short-wave set (music from Japan, Red China) through Fern’s describing the world as geology, or those childhood bus-trips . . . . . “That’s right, old timer, I’ll be back.”

     He slips the map under his vest. He leaps to attention, clicks his heels and brays like a mule. Only a slight pause in the furore. “9.30 trans-world flight, 9.30 TRANS-WORLD LEAVING FOR SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE. ALL PASSENGERS TO TUNNEL 3,” the loudspeaker again Enough people to fill a small hockey rink crush tunnel 3. It’s almost supernatural, he thinks. And only a few years ago, men landed on the moon. Of course, it’s more than a few years categorically . . . . . but he spends so much time in the air these days . . . . . Fenn was certainly right, yes there are school-children in Poland, bricklayers in Sweden, and others, many others, barkers for strip joints in Fnisco, the detail carries on . . . . . billions, billions of addresses . . . . . and people rising, falling through time zones . . . . . He is amid the herd, a thousand plus being prodded along, he yawns, another member of the herd off to his left — farts . . . . . a response . . . . . someone’s nose touches his shoulder blade, ah that’s better . . . . . he feels his feet contact the escalator stairs . . . . . Really though he shouldn’t be too critical of airline personnel, after all he spends so much time with them, and they suffer only from more access, more exposure, the older pilots are usually family men sad and tired of over-night hotels, the stewardii merely wish some sort of liberation, which is seldom found . . . . . he wonders of his private compartment is ready and all his things, this should be a long flight . . . . . possibly he’ll stay up a month or two . . . . . he’ll age slightly when they come down to re-fuel . . . . . but he’s becoming younger all the time . . . . . no doubt about it . . . . . it sure is easy to be rich, to be wealthy, that’s the thing . . . . . He dashes up the staircase in the ship like a little boy. Once inside the compartment he switches on the TV. Monitor . . . . . he enjoys watching the rest of the herd pile on, struggle for place in row on row of seats . . . . . it should be a fun flight, a few artistic movies and the like, why if he remembers right it’s like that story he heard when he was a little kid . . . . . “GOOD MORNING LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THIS IS YOUR PILOT. MY STAFF AND I WELCOME YOU ABOARD FOR WHAT WE HOPE YOU WILL FIND A PLEASANT JOURNEY. BREAKFAST WILL BE SERVED AFTER TAKE-OFF, AND A SHORT MOVIE WHICH WE HOPE YOU WILL ENJOY WILL FOLLOW. OUR FLIGHT ALTITUDE WILL BE 80 MILES AND SHIP VELOSITY 3 MILES PER SECOND. COMPUTER STATED FLIGHT TIME IS 75 MINUTES. FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS PLEASE.”