The Tyre

You've just finished writing a poem about a tyre. In the first half of the poem, you remember finding a tractor tyre on the moor behind your parents' house, then rolling it down into the village with four or five friends, to burn on Bonfire Night ...

It wasn't unusual to go wandering off over the hills, just as it wasn't unusual to find things in the middle of nowhere without any reasonable explanation. A bag of golf balls on one occasion, a pram, the bottom half of a turquoise bikini, and so on. In the case of the tyre, we must have tripped right over it, because it was sewn to the earth with tuft-grass and rushes, and the stitching had to be unpicked before we could prise it out of the peat and lift it up.

Growing up plays tricks with the brain, especially where weights and measures are concerned, and if in the end the tyre was actually the spare wheel from a Morris Minor, then so be it. But at the time it was massive; thick-skinned,hardly manageable, a huge monster of a thing, staggering blind drunk across the moor as we rolled it, using the diagonal wedges of its tread as handles.

You're more or less certain that the past, as some poets have already said, is a writer's only reserve. Almost all poems are the products of memory and recollection, as if the process of writing were an effort to recombine with that semi-conscious, half innocent state of childhood, as if all poems were statements of loss ...

In the second part of the poem, you describe what happened when the tyre reached the road. The village is down in the bottom of a geographical bowl, with all roads descending into it at a steep angle. This particular road is steeper than most, and straighter, and there came a point at which the tyre gained an unstoppable and terrible momentum. However much we tried to slow it down or tried to wobble it to the ground with rugby tackles and Kung-Fu kicks, it didn't even flinch, and carried on picking up speed towards the junction with the main road across the Pennines. At one stage, it even mounted the banking to turn a right-hand bend, then crossed the A62 between two wagons going at sixty miles an hour in opposite directions. You sometimes wonder if the two drivers ever jump from their sleep as a hundredweight of black rubber passes in front of the windscreen.

After the junction, the tyre careered on into the centre of the village, and we lost sight of it as it followed the camber of the street and turned to the left by the graveyard. Out of breath, with our hearts in our mouths and hands black with the evidence, we entered the world of houses and shops, expecting broken glass and buckled metal at least,or at worst, the swatted fly of an upturned pram, with its wheels spinning in the air. But the tyre was nowhere. The giant vulcanized beast we'd brought to life had completely vanished; no one knew a thing about it, and being thankful and exhausted and children, we simply accepted it as a fact, and got on with the next thing.

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.