"The Tyre" by Simon Armitage

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 burning rubber,

the tyre itself embedded in a house

or lying in the 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.

Source of the text – Simon Armitage, The Shout: Selected Poems.  Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2005, p. 67-68.

TJB: Unsteerable. Like a Frost woodpile or jar in Tennessee only cut loose, moved, then disappearing. This rolling story chews on its many verbs.