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The highway south gives straight new meaning, and nothing prepared you for this being half way from somewhere to somewhere else and so far from anywhere.
The last town was like all the others—a lurid mile of burger joints and motels—and that clown in the big rig, leeching your rear fender, pulled in for diesel and coffee way back.
Passing the first cactus your eyes flick to the gas gauge, seeking reassurance, sweep miles of sagebrush for other vehicles—
there are none; for now the future is all telephone poles and yellow coneflowers bobbing by the road and distant mountains never getting any nearer.
But by afternoon you’re in the mountains; on the dirt-road a curl of red dust clings like a bad reputation. After the third pass the plain’s heat reaches up once more
and, back amongst desert scrub and mesas, the radio’s talking Navajo and all you understand is Taco Bell and Kwik-Lube.
It’s late, and getting later, but the road insists; the windshield’s dusty now, you’re almost off the map; then, in low sun, the first adobe houses melt out of a hillside—adobe, the colour
of earth, of dried blood, the colour of landscape— while in the mirror, blacktop reels out behind towards successive rows of mountains: brown, then blue, then grey, then only sky.
watches departing trains unpick the silver tangle of rails; he notices the slow binary of tail-lights as coaches wag through pointwork: right then left; yes and no; wrong or right?
He has handed in the mobile phone, the pager, the keys to the red Peugeot; in the Admin. Office he handed in his life to the girl with green finger-nails who’ll file and forget.
What started here is finishing here—he could never have predicted that nearly thirty years ago—and yet he’s sure he was never precisely here before, not where he finds himself now.
There were nights far away—in trains, on stations, tramping the length of snow-covered yards sliced by a north wind that pummelled windows in the cabin— when he’d wondered where the journey
was taking him. Like the model engine in a train-set he has chased down tracks, round curves, been stopped by signals, shunted into sidings, but thought he was generally headed somewhere
only to find that somewhere is back here. Last night he dined with colleagues round the table; this morning, in a hotel lobby, the circle closed and he was left outside. It has all the inevitability
of a film ratcheting towards its final scene, the actor caught in tight close-up behind rising credits; and should the camera pull back at any time during the six minutes he waits here for the train home,
place him in context, frame him on the platform among this swelling crowd, no matter how wide the angle, the lens would always find him— for those six minutes—utterly alone.
A reluctant dog, stretching the lead taut, it lags behind the tow-plane clambering through the tiers of air over Dunstable Down.
When unleashed it pauses, pivots, puts out a wingtip like a steadying hand to regain balance, then grabs a thermal, treads an unseen high-wire round
a tight helix, teetering higher, never quite falling off. At last it spills willingly from the edge of rising heat, dives at the speed of a kestrel’s
plunge on to prey, only to change its mind, flick upwards, clawing height from dwindling lift as momentum falters. Its pilot surfs sky, afloat
on the hill’s updraught and the wind curving over sculpted fibreglass until, drawn irresistibly to ground, he approaches the field; but above the grass
his craft hesitates, stays buoyant, clings briefly to those last few feet of altitude, loath to be re-joined to its shadow, become inanimate once more on the earth.
No gentle rain from heaven but a clear blue sky, just as in Manhattan three mornings earlier; the same feeling of unreality, too, and that sensation of being felled, of also having been on the trajectory of something not seen coming.
That’s scene one, in which they’re returning homewards on a country lane—not much dialogue here—and everything outside the car so visibly unchanged, conspiring to be exactly the same as usual, so unrepentantly normal.
In the second scene our heroine—for it is she—is on a trolley being wheeled down a long white corridor while he watches in silence, a bit-part player for the moment, wishing the bloody director would cut that swelling music.
There’s nudity in scene three—essential to the plot—and she accepted this when pitched into the part. She’s in the bath; a glimpse of fading scars, left side, inner quadrant: in truth, less than a pound—but still closest to the heart.
shortlisted for The Frogmore Poetry Prize, 2002 published in The Frogmore Papers, no. 60, Autumn 2002 |
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