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The Ordeal

By Glyn Maxwell b. 1962 Glyn Maxwell

Acknowledged on our side town,

bragged of far from here, he’d been

our schoolfellow. He’d struggled in

all but the soft options.

He’d struggled in the stuff that’s meant

to get us somewhere: history,

French. But from the windows

we unbolted to hang out of

we would always see him racing

round the dust of the chalk oval,

with one who Swiss-timed seriously,

wanting the world warned.

I was among some eighteen

to shoulder him home gleaming,

his sweat like a belonging, skin

from somewhere new he came from,

and when he strolled out showered

in a suit that was a watchword,

we made notes like the nobodies

we grinned to see we were now,

now national talk was of him.

No snapshot really caught it.

I am among the few who saw him

up close and believe me.

He set himself what no one

had imagined and we bet him,

which teamed us with the watches, made us

sidekicks, I was kidding.

It teamed us with the ones who say

Impossible! Too far!

The ones who say The laws are laws,

alas! but hope they are.

It started when the gun cracked

You’re dead if he can do this.

Flashes went. We stood there,

officialdom. When it was wholly

evident he couldn’t do,

the lid came off the subject,

and the night relaxed its grip

for none ever thought it likely

and the fault was with him only.

To have sought fault in the world,

to have tested it. We left then,

ashamed to share his corner

though we took it in good humour

at other towns we work in.

We set him further leves

when we thought about him. Sometimes

you hear he smashed his record,

but he doesn’t make the freeze-frame,

is not among the seven

who relax across the line, or you will

hear he missed it narrowly

in drizzle out at Iffley

if you happen to be passing

through the business end of Oxford.

—Failing that a rustling

in what passes for a forest

when the clock is on the warpath

for a head-to-head in winter.

Source: The Breakage: Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000)

Biography

Born in England to Welsh parents, Glyn Maxwell was educated at Oxford University and Boston University, where he studied both poetry and theater with Derek Walcott. This simultaneous training in two disciplines has enabled him to create innovative work across genres. Maxwell has written numerous verse plays as well as long narrative poems. The Sugar Mile (2005), a verse narrative set in a Manhattan bar a few days before . . .

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