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

He hated the way people walked up through trains. Causing mayhem to gain a few seconds at the terminus, only to sit for hours in front of the telly. Some tribe of North American Indians, he read somewhere, would travel three days. Then rest in the shade of a tree to wait for their spirits to catch up.

Why did he remember things like that? Long after he’d forgotten, forever, abandoned phone numbers and addresses, girlfriends’ names, the college pubs where whole weeks were whittled away jar by jar, random facts would come at him like one piece at a time of a jigsaw he would one day be asked to guess in its entirety, and he wouldn’t have a clue. Just jumbled colours, suggested edges. Matching amoebae of blank blue.

Outside the demeanour of fields shifted subtly. Like the ongoing loss of hair or the thickening of jowls. But always the same England? He could only notice how it had changed, it seemed, by bringing to mind a snapshot of where he’d started from and holding it up, ghost-like, against the scenery idling past. Even then it took a sharp imagination to nail it. The Present, so persistent. Remoulding, constantly, the past into its own image. And the young girl opposite – how imbedded she was in her Present. He could imagine no sane, non-violent way of ever showing her the boy in him, his ever-present fourteen-year-old as real and remarkable as submerged geology, as impossible to grasp. Her eyes had passed, a brief instant, over a greying, thinning head, barely registered what he presented to her in the depths of his brain, prehistoric as a fish nosing up an inch from the seabed in dim intuition of a beautiful swimmer gliding past hundreds of metres above. In a nose-diving Boeing, on shared flotsam littering a grim Arctic swell, contemplating human flesh under the scant shelter of a Himalayan air-wreck, their hands might link a moment in honest need.

A bridge, without a river. Electrified fencing. Chimneys and slate, clean as scales on a fish. Houses in their pairs, joined at the hip, the shoulder. Each modelled on the other. Cars glinting in shared driveways, carefully aligned, apart. Why did that buffered siding leap out at him? He heard again the interviewer’s tone that morning, conducting the type of interview he’d never have countenanced twenty, even ten years ago. Nothing to do with work; just wishing someone, somewhere to say yes to him, to nod a hint of approval, however institutional.

Yes? A suited man was suddenly claimed by his mobile, believing his girl’s face couched there in his hand. It showed in his eyes. Making love to a circuit. He dealt with the call with tender efficiency, then tucked her back into an inside pocket. The couple to his right carried on exchanging little commerces, as they’d done since Northampton  …how much do you think…? .. the most expensive wedding we’ve been…might be cheaper if we … The cockney he’d passed in the buffet car was probably still thumbing that monstrous and improbable pile of tobacco into clip-top sachets, every bit as enraptured as an acolyte portioning the miraculously vivid ginger beard-clippings of a long-dead saint. A young executive intermittently pianoed his laptop, negotiating his little gasps and ejaculations of panic, consuming fingernails in a kind of punctuation. The girl, mouthing some song he’d probably never hear, her brain consumed. He poised himself on the brink of attracting their gaze, fearful he might, wishing he could, without embarrassment or misunderstanding.

Again, the train slowed. The tremolo of steel against steel grew slack, almost heavy. Suddenly, ball against bat. All simpler then, when older people had the worries and called you in to steaming food or delicate sandwiches poised before smiling faces somehow larger and hands rooted for shillings that could fill an afternoon with Jamboree bags and sherbert lemons. The brother who’d seek you out before you woke; a mother’s voice reaching up past bannisters, winkling you out of warm bedclothes into the thick slipstream of bacon and toast. The slightly sulphurous comfort of an egg, lingering on the tongue for hours; soldiers neat and expectant, bending obediently to the yolk and its unambivalent pleasure.

The buffet trolley squeezed through, generating a shockwave of adjustment to magazines and elbows. Miniatures shimmered. The attendant caught his attention, raised his eyebrows in expectation. But he remembered regurgitated tuna sandwiched between soggy bread, looked down at his watch before the instinctive smile had a chance to break. The clocks had gone back. He’d return to the flat in darkness, the walls held in tension an hour behind the world. Room by room, alarm-clock by wall-clock, he’d correct (being careful to subtract the two minutes with which he cheated punctual trains) and the house would click back into place, aligned with its neighbours.

If one hour, why not two? Three? How far back could he take it? After all, miracles weren’t size-dependent. A mere drop of wine, forged from water. Time’s immense lava-flow, reversed a microsecond. That would do it. Make it possible. A smile. A single proffered word.

The canvas of window was still wide enough for clouds to draw patterns, fractals of shade drifting and churning their chaotic mathematics. The girl chewed at a fingernail with precision and intensity, as though it had to be got just right. The executive stopped biting his. The young man and the girl, with him an accidental moment. For him, everyone in the carriage was travelling between two unknowns, caught in this swaying ritual, the muffled passing-bell of wheel on track. Somewhere to somewhere. Nowhere to nowhere.

Suddenly they seemed to him as sharp and isolate as individual krill under the magnifying glass. In the city they moved in swarms, difficult to make out, a defence against ubiquitous predation. Now he saw in her features all the girls, all the groups of girls, travelling around England. Where were the boys? The train drew acceleration out of a curve, and another track cleaved away. Abruptly russet, its buffers were emphatic – a massive punctuation of rust left hanging, saying nothing. Like his thoughts, his letters, his attempts at writing. No big themes would come to him. Just exasperating near-misses that became a list of ingredients: Janet, Mina, Frances, Annabel. A recipe of disaster. Had he been born on another continent the names would be different. But not the list.

The teenage girl was mouthing another song, or the same song, her young eyes dead, detached from her lips. Or was there, inside, a living, older woman as impossible to reach as his boy? Soon they would reach the end. Fields had become allotments, housing estates, streets. The green no-man’s land infiltrated by street signs, over-run with tarmac. Forward posts of the city. The train would plunge into overbearing brickwork, a blackening of diesel and soot. Brakes would be applied, perhaps in time. He would find himself at the wrong end of the platform, the last to leave. He would always do that. And they would always collect their bags, having none of them spoken; and without speaking, and in various shades of purpose, they would leave.