THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2010 by Simon Armitage
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.
Originally published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber in 2010.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Armitage, Simon, 1963–
Seeing stars : poems / by Simon Armitage.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59943-8
I. Title.
PR6051 R564S44 2011
821’.914—dc22 2010052918
Front-of-jacket photograph © William Wegman Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson
v3.1
For Sue
Contents
The Christening
An Accommodation
The Cuckoo
Back in the Early Days of the Twenty-first Century
Michael
I’ll Be There to Love and Comfort You
The English Astronaut
Hop In, Dennis
Upon Opening the Chest Freezer
Seeing Stars
Last Words
My Difference
The Accident
Aviators
15:30 by the Elephant House
An Obituary
Knowing What We Know Now
The Experience
Collaborators
Ricky Wilson Couldn’t Sleep
The Knack
The Practical Way to Heaven
To the Bridge
Beyond Huddersfield
Cheeses of Nazareth
Show and Tell
Upon Unloading the Dishwasher
Poodles
The Personal Touch
The Last Panda
Sold to the Lady in the Sunglasses and Green Shoes
The War of the Roses
A Nativity
The Delegates
The Overtones
The Sighting of the Century
The Crunch
Bringing It All Back Home
Last Day on Planet Earth
The Christening
I am a sperm whale. I carry up to 2.5 tonnes of an oil-like
balm in my huge, coffin-shaped head. I have a brain the
size of a basketball, and on that basis alone am entitled to
my opinions. I am a sperm whale. When I breathe in, the
fluid in my head cools to a dense wax and I nosedive into
the depths. My song, available on audiocassette and
compact disc is a comfort to divorcees, astrologists and
those who have “pitched the quavering canvas tent of their
thoughts on the rim of the dark crater.” The oil in my head
is of huge commercial value and has been used by NASA,
for even in the galactic emptiness of deep space it does not
freeze. I am attracted to the policies of the Green Party on
paper but once inside the voting booth my hand is guided
by an unseen force. Sometimes I vomit large chunks of
ambergris. My brother, Jeff, owns a camping and outdoor
clothing shop in the Lake District and is a recreational user
of cannabis. Customers who bought books about me also
bought Do Whales Have Belly Buttons? by Melvin Berger
and street maps of Cardiff. In many ways I have seen it all.
I keep no pets. Lying motionless on the surface I am said
to be “logging,” and “lobtailing” when I turn and offer my
great slow fluke to the horizon. Don’t be taken in by the
dolphins and their winning smiles, they are the pickpockets
of the ocean, the gypsy children of the open waters and
they are laughing all the way to Atlantis. On the basis of
“finders keepers” I believe the Elgin Marbles should
remain the property of the British Crown. I am my own
God—why shouldn’t I be? The first people to open me up
thought my head was full of sperm, but they were men, and
had lived without women for many weeks, and were far
from home. Stuff comes blurting out.
An Accommodation
—— and I both agreed that something had to change,
but I was still stunned and not a little hurt when I
staggered home one evening to find she’d draped a
net curtain slap bang down the middle of our home.
She said, “I’m over here and you’re over there, and
from now on that’s how it’s going to be.” It was a
small house, not much more than a single room,
which made for one or two practical problems.
Like the fridge was on my side and the oven was on
hers. And she had the bed while I slept fully
clothed in the inflatable chair. Also there was a
Hüsker Dü CD on her half of the border which I
wouldn’t have minded hearing again for old times’
sake, and her winter coat stayed hanging on the
door in my domain. But the net was the net, and we
didn’t so much as pass a single word through its
sacred veil, let alone send a hand crawling beneath
it, or, God forbid, yank it aside and go marching
across the line. Some nights she’d bring men back,
deadbeats, incompatible, not fit to kiss the heel of
her shoe. But it couldn’t have been easy for her
either, watching me mooch about like a ghost,
seeing me crashing around in the empty bottles and
cans. And there were good times too, sitting side by
side on the old settee, the curtain between us, the
TV in her sector but angled towards me, taking me
into account.
Over the years the moths moved in, got a taste for
the net, so it came to resemble a giant web, like a
thing made of actual holes strung together by fine,
nervous threads. But there it remained, and remains
to this day, this tattered shroud, this ravaged lace
suspended between our lives, keeping us
inseparable and betrothed.
The Cuckoo
When James Cameron was a young man, this happened
to him. After his eighteenth birthday party had come to
an end and the guests had disappeared wearing colourful
hats and clutching cubes of Battenberg cake wrapped in
paper napkins, James’s mother sat him down at the
breakfast bar. The smell of snuffed candles and
discharged party poppers floated in the air. “James, I’m
not your mother,” she told him. “What?” he managed to
croak. “I work for the government and my contract
comes to an end today.” “Does dad know?” asked the
bewildered James. “He’s not your father. Don’t be cross
with us, we’re only doing our job.” James felt like a gold
tooth sent flying through the air in a fist fight. “What
about my brother, Peter, and all the family?” “Actors,”
she said, very matter-of-factly. “I don’t believe you. Not
auntie Madge.” “Especially her. She went to drama
school. She was always a tad Shakespearian for my taste
but some people like that approach.
” The small tear in
James’s eye, like a baby snail, finally emerged from its
shell. “Will you leave me?” he asked. She said, “There’s
a taxi coming in half an hour. I’ve left a chilli con carne
in the fridge and there’s a stack of pizzas in the freezer.
Pepperoni—the ones you like. We’re opening a bed and
breakfast place on the east coast. Actually it’s a safe-
house for political prisoners—I can tell you that because
meanest woman who ever lived, though of course he
loved her very being.
James went outside. His best friend, Snoobie, and Carla,
his girlfriend, were leaning on the wall with suitcases in
their hands. Carla was wearing sunglasses and passing a
piece of chewing gum from one side of her mouth to the
other. “Not you two as well?” said James, despairingly.
“ ’Fraid so,” said Snoobie. “Anyway, take care. I’ve been
offered a small part in a play at the Palace Theatre in
Watford and there’s a read through tomorrow morning.
She’s off to Los Angeles, aren’t you, Carla?” “Hollywood,”
she said, still chewing the gum. James said, “Didn’t it mean
anything, Carla? Not even that time behind the taxi rank
after the Microdisney concert?” “Dunno,” she shrugged. “I’d
have to check the file.” James could have punched a hole in
her chest and ripped out the poisonous blowfish of her heart.
He walked heavily up to the paddock. If he’d been a smoker
who’d quit, now would have been the time to start again. If
he’d been carrying a loaded firearm in his pocket he might
have put that to his lips as well. Then a bird fell out of the
sky and landed just a yard or so from his feet. A cuckoo.
It flapped a few times and died. However tormented or
shabby you’re feeling, however low your spirits, thought
James, there’s always someone worse off. His mother had
taught him that. It was then he noticed the tiny electric
motor inside the bird’s belly, and the wires under its wings,
and the broken spring sticking out of its mouth.
Back in the Early Days of the Twenty-First Century
Back in the early days of the twenty-first century I was
working as a balloon seller on the baked and crumbling
streets of downtown Mumbai. It was lowly work for a
man like me with a sensitive nature and visionary dreams,
but at least I wasn’t moping around like a zombie,
tapping the windows of taxis and limousines with a
broken fingernail, begging for biscuits and change.
Besides which, these were no ordinary inflatables, but
gargantuan things, like gentle, alien beings. To drum up
business I’d fill one with air and slap the flat of my hand
on the quivering skin, the sound booming out among
passing tourists, reverberating through body and soul.
It was a sticky and slow Thursday in March when he
crossed the road towards me, that man in his seersucker
suit, and chose a purple balloon from the bag, lifted it
with his little finger like evidence found at the scene of
some filthy crime, and said, “How much for this?” We
haggled and he bargained hard, drove me down to my
lowest price, which was two rupees, then he said, “OK,
but I want it blowing up.” “No, sir,” I said, “that price
is without air.” “Blowing up, buddy, right to the top, or
I’m walking away,” said the man in the seersucker suit.
Trade had been slack that day. In fact in ten sun-
strangled hours this was my only nibble, and to walk
home with empty pockets is to follow the hearse, so they
say. So I exhaled at great length, breathed the air of
existence into that purple blimp, and to this day I wish I
had not. For with that breath my soul was sold, and all
for the price of a cup of betel nuts or a lighted candle
placed in the lap of the elephant god.
And his lazy daughter danced with me once and left me
to slouch and gag in the stinking womb of my own stale
breath. Then his fat boy bundled me straight to his room,
and when I wouldn’t yield to his two-fisted punches and
flying bicycle kicks, all the spite of puberty coursed
through the veins in his neck, and the light in his eye
shrank to a white-hot, pin-sharp, diamond-tipped point.
Michael
So George has this theory: the first thing we ever steal,
when we’re young, is a symbol of what we become later
in life, when we grow up. Example: when he was nine
George stole a Mont Blanc fountain pen from a fancy
gift shop in a hotel lobby—now he’s an award-winning
novelist. We test the theory around the table and it seems
to add up. Clint stole a bottle of cooking sherry, now
he owns a tapas bar. Kirsty’s an investment banker and
she stole money from her mother’s purse. Tod took a
never stole anything in his whole life, and he’s an actor
i.e. unemployed. Derek says, “But wait a second, I stole
a blue Smurf on a polythene parachute.” And Kirsty says,
“So what more proof do we need, Derek?”
Every third Saturday in the month I collect my son from
his mother’s house and we take off, sometimes to the
dog track, sometimes into the great outdoors. Last week
we headed into the Eastern Fells to spend a night under
the stars and to get some quality time together, father
and son. With nothing more than a worm, a bent nail and
a thread of cotton we caught a small, ugly-looking fish;
I was all for tossing it back in the lake, but Luke surprised
me by slapping it dead on a flat stone, slitting its belly
and washing out its guts in the stream. Then he cooked it
over a fire of brushwood and dead leaves, and for all the
thinness of its flesh and the annoying pins and needles of
its bones, it made an honest meal. Later on, as it dropped
dark, we bedded down in an old deer shelter on the side
of the hill. There was a hole in the roof. Lying there on
our backs, it was as if we were looking into the inky blue
eyeball of the galaxy itself, and the darker it got, the more
the eyeball appeared to be staring back. Remembering
George’s theory, I said to Luke, “So what do you think
you’ll be, when you grow up?” He was barely awake,
but from somewhere in his sinking thoughts and with a
drowsy voice he said, “I’m going to be an executioner.”
Now the hole in the roof was an ear, the ear of the
universe, exceptionally interested in my very next words.
I sat up, rummaged about in the rucksack, struck a match
and said, “Hold on a minute, son, you’re talking about
taking a person’s life. Why would you want to say a
thing like that?” Without even opening his eyes he said,
“But I’m sure I could do it. Pull the hood over someone’s
head, squeeze the syringe, flick the switch, whatever.
You know, if they’d done wrong. Now go to sleep,
dad.”
I’ll Be There to Love and Comfort You
The couple next door were testing the structural fabric
of the house with their difference of opinion. “I can’t
take much more of this,” I said to Mimi my wife. Right
then there was another almighty crash, as if every pan
in the kitchen had clattered to the tiled floor. Mimi said,
“Try to relax. Take one of your tablets.” She brewed a
pot of camomile tea and we retired to bed. But the
pounding and caterwauling carried on right into the small
hours. I was dreaming that the mother of all asteroids
was locked on a collision course with planet Earth,
when unbelievably a fist came thumping through the
bedroom wall just above the headboard. In the metallic
light of the full moon I saw the bloody knuckles and a
cobweb tattoo on the flap of skin between finger and
thumb, before the fist withdrew. Mimi’s face was
powdered with dirt and dust, but she didn’t wake. She
looked like a corpse pulled from the rubble of an
earthquake after five days in a faraway country famous
only for its paper kites.
I peered through the hole in the wall. It was dark on the
other side, with just occasional flashes of purple or green
light, like those weird electrically-powered life forms
zipping around in the ocean depths. There was a rustling
noise, like something stirring in a nest of straw, then a
voice, a voice no bigger than a sixpence, crying for help.
Now Mimi was right next to me. “It’s her,” she said. I
said, “Don’t be crazy, Mimi, she’d be twenty-four by
now.” “It’s her I tell you. Get her back, do you hear me?
GET HER BACK.” I rolled up my pyjama sleeve and
pushed my arm into the hole, first to my elbow, then as
far as my shoulder and neck. The air beyond was
clammy and damp, as if I’d reached into a nineteenth-
century London street in late November, fog rolling in up
the river, a cough in a doorway. Mimi was out of her
mind by now. My right cheek and my ear were flat to the
wall. Then slowly but slowly I opened my fist to the
unknown. And out of the void, slowly but slowly it