Poetry Thursday - The Tyre Poem by Simon Armitage

Stanza Stone at Blackstone Beck

The Tyre

Just how it came to rest where it rested,
miles out, miles from the last farmhouse even,
was a fair question. Dropped by hurricane
or aeroplane perhaps for some reason,
put down as a cairn or marker, then lost.
Tractor-size, six or seven feet across,
it was sloughed, unconscious, warm to the touch,
its gashed, rhinoceros, sea-lion skin
nursing a gallon of rain in its gut.
Lashed to the planet with grasses and roots,
it had to be cut. Stood up it was drunk
or slugged, wanted nothing more than to slump,
to spiral back to its circle of sleep,
dream another year in its nest of peat.
We bullied it over the moor, drove it,
pushed from the back or turned it from the side,
unspooling a thread in the shape and form
of its tread, in its length, and in its line,
rolled its weight through broken walls, felt the shock
when it met with stones, guided its sleepwalk
down to meadows, fields, onto level ground.
There and then we were one connected thing,
five of us, all hands steering a tall ship
or one hand fingering a coin or ring.

Once on the road it picked up pace, free-wheeled,
then moved up through the gears, and wouldn't give
to shoulder-charges, kicks; resisted force
until to tangle with it would have been
to test bone against engine or machine,
to be dragged in, broken, thrown out again
minus a limb. So we let the thing go,
leaning into the bends and corners,
balanced and centred, riding the camber,
carried away with its own momentum.
We pictured an incident up ahead:
life carved open, gardens in half, parted,
a man on a motorbike taken down,
a phone-box upended, children erased,
police and an ambulance in attendance,
scuff-marks and the smell of broken rubber,
the tyre itself embedded in a house
or lying in a gutter, playing dead.

But down in the village the tyre was gone,
and not just gone but unseen and unheard of,
not curled like a cat in the graveyard, not
cornered in the playground like a reptile,
or found and kept like a giant fossil.
Not there or anywhere. No trace. Thin air.

Being more in tune with the feel of things
than science and facts, we knew that the tyre
had travelled too fast for its size and mass,
and broken through some barrier of speed,
outrun the act of being driven, steered,
and at that moment gone beyond itself
towards some other sphere, and disappeared. 

Simon Armitage

Armitage was born in 1963 in West Yorkshire and lives there now. First published in 1989, he gave up his day job (probation officer) in 1994. From 1989 onwards, he published a collection every two years or so, with awards and prizes, followed by commissions, residencies, anthologies, performance in/on various media. From 2010-2012 he worked on the Stanza Stones project; in 2011 he was appointed Professor of Poetry at University of Sheffield; in 2012 he worked on the Poetry Parnassus project, part of London's Cultural Olympiad.

Said the Guardian in 2011, writing of Armitage's poetry, especially his translations of Sir Gawain and The Death of King Arthur -

The sense of dislocation [had] the salutary effect of encouraging Armitage to put pen to paper. "It was another way of returning home. Living in Britain is an incredibly intense linguistic experience, and a lot of that relates closely to geography: your accent, your dialect, your background, your class. Many poems are expressions of that, even subconsciously. At some level I knew my vocabulary was a product of my landscape." A secondary benefit of his encounter with the Gawain poet was the discovery of just how deeply these roots extend: the original is written in a recognisably north-west dialect, and Armitage, in a beguiling BBC4 documentary, traced the poem through the landscape, unearthing the many words that are still in local use today.