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

     HEAVY RAIN this morning, Wednesday the 22nd September. On the kitchen table, an open book, today’s newspaper and a pile of different-sized envelopes, brown and white (and as yet unopened), that landed on the doormat earlier. It’s 10.00 am. Water drips from the overflowing gutters, and tinkles into the outside drains. But I’m not really listening to it: I’m spending a night with Freya Stark in a Bedouin tent on the Jol in Southern Arabia: “...the Jol,” she says, “has the fascination and the terror of vastness not only in space, but in time…” The wind must have shifted: now the rain, sixty-three years later, even heavier and almost hail, is clattering on to the kitchen window in a different world, but she goes on: ...as one rises to its sunbathed level, the human world is lost; Nature alone is at work, carving geography in her millennial periods, her temporal abysses made visible in stone...”   I try to imagine what the inhuman landscape of the Jol looked like all those years ago. But then the telephone rings, just as I’m developing an interesting (and totally unoriginal) theory about the non-linearity of time and how it stretches back and forth to link, as now, the present to the past.

Hello, I say -- It’s me, says Freddie -- Where are you? I ask -- I’m here -- Where’s that? -- I’m on the mobile, I can hardly hear you -- WHERE ARE YOU? -- I’m here, I’m still here -- Where’s that? -- Where’s what? -- Where you are -- Well, I’m out in the street -- Which street? Where? -- The High Street -- No, no, what’s it called, where is it? -- What, the street? -- Yes, the street where you are – I don’t know, just the High Street I suppose -- Well, where is it? -- Where’s what? -- This High Street, where is it? -- Well, it’s North London somewhere -- You don’t know where exactly? -- No, not really -- OK, I’ll try again, why are you there? -- I just rang to say hello, I didn’t really want anything -- Fine, but what are you doing there? -- lust walking, I felt like walking -- But if you’re in North London, you’re miles from where you live -- I know, I just felt like a walk -- That’s a pretty long walk – I caught a bus here, I just wanted to get out -- Is there any point in my asking why? -- Why what? – Why you wanted to get out -- No, not realty, I don’t know -- All right, I won’t, I give up -- Give up what? -- Never mind. What’s all that noise? -- Traffic, there’s a lot of it up here -- There usually is, everywhere  - I wanted to tell you something -- What is it? -- That’s just the trouble, I can’t remember now -- It’ll come back to you if you don’t think about it. Was it important? -- I can’t remember, I’ve lost it now, I had it about five minutes ago when I was walking along, but it’s completely gone -- You’re getting very faint -- What? -- I SAID YOU’RE GETTING VERY FAINT -- I can’t....Freddie begins, then the line goes dead. Oh well, I think, if it’s that important he’ll ring again.

Back at the table I pick up the two postcards on top of the pile of mail. One shows a gateway into the Basilian Monastery in Vilnius, the other is a picture of the main square in Porto. In the foreground there’s a wide traffic island with a statue in the middle of it, lots of red and white buses, and a street in the background lined with trees leading up to what looks like a municipal building with a tall tower - the messages on both the cards are unimportant, just the usual greetings from friends away from home. But it does seem an odd coincidence to get, in London, a postcard, pouted in Devon, with a view of a place in Eastern Europe where I’d had a long conversation with one of the priests. I’d started the conversation by asking him, since I’d only just entered the building and didn’t know its name, whether his establishment was

, - church or monastery.

He said it was the latter and told me how he’d just been to London to visit Father Anthony. He seemed to assume I’d know who Father Anthony was. He even rushed off to show me a book he’d brought back from his trip, which was the Father’s autobiography. But maybe I didn’t understand fully what he told me. He spoke excitedly and very fast in Russian and I strained hard to interpret what he said. That was only two years ago, but time has stretched itself out and made that conversation seem even more distant than it is. And now I’m wondering what really made Freddie telephone me from North London and why he’s wandering about up there so far from home in what sounds like a somewhat confused state.

But the phone doesn’t ring again so maybe I’ll never know. Meanwhile, Ms Stark is spending her first night on the Jōl. When I join her again, she’s just woken up at 3 am. “Some bird,” she writes, “perhaps an owl, whistled from the shadows: a great hard brilliance shone on our world of stones. The wind still rushed through the motionless tree whose leaves were too small and hard to bend before it.... The frozen air shimmered, the moon rose high, but the opposite western sky was soft under an avenue of stars…”: the Jōl, I think, must be something like the bleak grey expanse of the Burren poised high above the southern shore of Galway Bay. That was certainly a world of stone, though the air wasn’t frozen when we saw the moon come up over it. The ‘avenue of stars’ could have been the Milky Way which was clearly visible that evening when we walked down the long back road from Ballyvaghan and saw an orange-yellow light slowly becoming visible between two rocks on top of the Burren. At first it was like the headlights of a car but, within five minutes, it grew much bigger, rose higher over the flat top of the Burren and even picked up speed. We could see it moving and expanding until it was three times the size of the normal moon, still an orange yellow, then moving away from us until it was hidden again behind that wall of limestone.

And outside now the rain has almost ceased. Ms Stark wanders out on to the Jōl which “looked like Dart moor this morning” (so perhaps it’s not like the Burren after all) “and we continued to watch the valleys drop away... as we passed the heads of these defiles, and deviated like ants that come in summer to cracks in the ground and wind about to circumvent them, we could watch the processes in the excavation of a wad!, its growth in concentration, as it were. Like our own affairs, it is first determined by some almost imperceptible accident, an invisible dip in the ground... I close the book: this is my crack in the ground, this room this morning where I’m trapped by the forces of nature. I pick up a couple of letters from the pile, stare at the envelopes, and put them back. I don’t need these now. It’s been quite enough of an accident this morning to have had, almost at once, the rain, Ms Stark’s wanderings mixed with memories of Vilnius, the Burren, even the view of Porto, as well as Freddie’s aimless meandering along a North London street, all such an accidental conjunction of disparate elements that I begin to sense a hidden pattern, but can’t determine what it is - at least not yet. Maybe it doesn’t matter if I can’t; maybe it’s enough to feel it’s there. Maybe accidents should just be allowed to happen.

It’s midday nosy. The rain has stopped. I go to the window and look out at the water dripping from the plants by the fence. Why is it that memory preserves certain things and not others, and often only what seems quite trivial? It keeps what it needs. I can still hear the priest’s tone of voice, though not the details of the conversation. Porto looks like Salamanca or quite a number of other southern cities, If I close my eyes the moon’s still rising over the Burren and I can hear Freddie saying ‘I can’t remember, I’ve lost it now’ and even see Ms Stark pulling aside the tent flap to see the moon. It’s all locked away somewhere in the brain. Time, stretching and contracting like elastic, is nothing, not the time of the clocks anyway: consciousness is the real miracle.

The sun's come out and the world is beginning to look quite different. But this is probably an accident too. I wonder what to do next as I peer through the wet glass at the bay tree by the fence and see another, miniature, world, busy with its own kind of life. From one time to another, from one world to another: there are minute lakes gathered in the folds of the bay tree’s leaves, each one rippling microscopically as the air drifts accidentally over it.