Simon Armitage

A huge purple door washed up in the bay overnight, its paintwork blistered and peeled from weeks at sea. The town storyteller wasted no time in getting to work: the beguiling, eldest girl of a proud, bankrupt farmer had slammed that door in the face of a Freemason’s son, who in turn had bulldozed both farm and family over the cliff, except for the girl, who lived now by the light and heat of a driftwood fire on a beach. There was some plan to use the door as a jetty or landing-stage, but it was all bullshit, the usual idle talk. That’s when he left and never returned. Him I won’t name — not known for his big ideas or carpentry skills, a famous non-swimmer, but last seen sailing out, riding the current and rounding the point in a small boat with tell-tale flashes of almost certainly purple paint.

Compiling this landmark anthology of poetry in English about dogs and musical instruments is like swimming through bricks. To date, I have only, “On the Death of Mrs. McTuesday’s Pug, Killed by a Falling Piano,” a somewhat obvious choice. True, an Aeolian harp whispers alluringly in the background of the anonymous sonnet, “The Huntsman’s Hound,” but beyond that — silence. I should resist this degrading donkey-work in favor of my own writing, wherein contentment surely lies. But A. Smith stares smugly from the reverse of the twenty pound note, and when my bank manager guffaws, small particles of saliva stream like a meteor shower through the infinity of dark space between his world and mine.

Eight-year-old sitting in Bramhall’s field, shoes scuffed from kicking a stone, too young for a key but old enough now to walk the short mile back from school. You’ve spied your mother down in the village crossing the street, purse in her fist. In her other hand her shopping bag nurses four ugly potatoes caked in mud, a boiling of peas, rags of meat, or a tail of fish in grease-proof paper, the price totted up in penciled columns of shillings and pence. How warm must she be in that winter coat? On Old Mount Road the nearer she gets the smaller she shrinks, until you reach out to carry her home on the flat of your hand or your fingertip, and she doesn’t exist.

To the Metropolitan Police Force, London: the asylum gates are locked and chained, but undone by wandering thoughts and the close study of maps. So from San Francisco, patron city of tramps, I scribble this note, having overshot Gloucester by several million strides, having walked on water. City of sad foghorns and clapboard ziggurats, of snakes-and-ladders streets and cadged cigarettes, city of pelicans, fish bones and flaking paint, of underfoot cable-car wires strained to breaking point    ... I eat little — a beard of grass, a pinch of oats — let the salt-tide scour and purge me inside and out, but my mind still phosphoresces with lightning strikes and I straddle each earthquake, one foot either side of the fault line, rocking the world’s seesaw. At dusk, the Golden Gate Bridge is heaven’s seashore: I watch boats heading home with the day’s catch or ferrying souls to glittering Alcatraz, or I face west and let the Pacific slip in bloodshot glory over the planet’s lip, sense the waterfall at the end of the journey. I am, ever your countryman, Ivor Gurney.