The Reinvention of Time Travel

Explorers

Memory may trap us in time and place;

imagination and lies leave no trace.

The Traveller realises that
personal identity is a
distraction from the mission …

Why Me? 4

Can this exploration –

my oration  -

still be

about

me,

about my going out

my overnight stays

those holidays

mollycoddled ways?

Aren’these novelties

these ancestries

a tease

squeezed into this tapestry,

this frieze of possibilities

histories, philosophies

random synchronicities

and all the specificities

that I can’t be without –

that make me me?

Surely you can see

why I should reprise

“Why me?”

Then unscrabble this: why else time travel

is taking so long to unravel.

… but the exploration of even
earlier memories continues

Explorers 1: Ultrasound

At the father end of the River Thames

vast ships silent like whales slid uncontained

by scale or cargo past the end of the road.

Skipping through an undiscovered garden,

all lice and spiders, I was barred and braced

at that tumbling gate from stepping out

into the staring chill sheer Estuary air.

My breath caught at the deadly chalk-cut edge

to a swaying depthless pit; my brain swam,

and scanned for infant sense where far below

cement works belched out dust and steam from hell.

All senses pulsed with raw intensity:

this wild place might have been grave’s end to me.

Years later I’d be burned by maidenhead,

Conception was an island far ahead.

Explorers 2: Gestation

Lost in woods, aged five, I later came back –

like one rejected by god and condemned,

they said, to walk the world another span,

since everyone deserves a second crack.

Adults who have such skill obscuring truth –

why people part, what makes them ill or worse –

must fear children for the power they wield,

and have some purpose in what they do reveal.

Before I could reason, while I could feel,

my sharp-lipped, tight-skinned wining aunt, a nurse,

took sandpaper flannels and acid soap

unprovoked and in malice to my face,

and pronounced to rhythms of her abrasion:

“When you were born the midwife had no doubt,

and told us bluntly you did not belong.

Why you’re still here, when others must be gone

is God’s own secret, I can’t work it out.”

Then she recounted my recovery,

lost to the forest for weeks – days or hours,

was it? – outlasting every frantic search,

then suddenly appearing at the door

like a surprise delivery by post.

“It so unnatural,” she said. “You should have died.

It isn’t possible that you survived.

You must be,” she hissed, “some other child.”

This pained and bony aunt died soon after

unshriven of her cruel allegation,

maybe riven, maybe not, by her lie.

For a boy of five whose mind is drilled

with stories of Jesus and Jack and Jill,

Ford cars and fairies and the Fall of Man,

untruth is not a separate option.

For someone who learns he doesn’t belong

any place he comes to is no less wrong

than any other place where he could be.

A child’s sole task with such deficiency –

the worthless half of some unfair exchange –

is to find the boy or girl who took his place.

I knew I was no changeling, but I changed,

left reins of earth behind and hitched to space.

I flew a weightless lifetime to confess

I only sought to lose that loneliness.

Explorers 3: Mitosis

Then instantly the feel and taste of earth

Returned me to a place of death and birth.

My first memory is waking under trees

at two years old to scent and touch release:

a hundred million spores escaping turf

and soil, enough to populate the earth.

Here is a lace of fallen awful things,

feather, fur and fungus interleaving,

worm-red mucus stain, and states that change

four ancient kingdoms back to mere domains.

Craving liquid warmth and nutrient dark,

fungi crept encaved in rot and humus,

damp-primed to hunt the chemistry of work,

their tongues of hyphae hot to lap life from us.  

I crawled in crumbled leaf-mould crust with slumps

of algae, bacteria, protista

whose enzymes make a slime of woodland sumps,

my brain fermented by what life consists of.

It could take days or decades here to die;

a species must decay to multiply.

I could feel the forest floor was shifting

on the switch of exits and existing.

This lesson in the grass can’t be unlearned:

that if I’m not consuming I’m consumed;

when everything that’s taken is returned

the forests are more festival than tomb.

When we’re all watched there’ll be no disorder,

and no need or leave to cross the border.

6. Settlers »