I nearly went to Svalbard. That was before the news feature
on the shot polar bear, the result of an ice safari. I was off
to a conference on darkness. I didn’t see the foxes on the
tundra, the aurora, or hear the paper on Verdi’s operas. I
didn’t buy a passport, told myself I didn’t have the budget,
I couldn’t afford it, ‘there’s no way you’re going to enjoy it.’
I was disappointed to read the Radisson Blue was booked,
when I knew there was no hovercraft involved. I explored
Google Maps: whether or not the venue was in the Arctic
Circle. I imagined my legs like tripods scrunching through
snow. I imagined mittens fused to my flesh, thumbs stuck,
my 4G useless. I began to picture the trip like a film with a
soundtrack featuring a theremin, scenes like a comic strip.
It started with my visits to an anechoic chamber. I wanted
to hear my pulse in my brain, reach stars on my retina, get
as close to death as a sound lab allows. I was obsessed with
Orpheus. I was depressed: talk of Charon, placing an obol
on the tongue. I was drawn to thoughts of lyres, chthonic
trials. I wondered where in Norway I’d taxi. A plane crash
was my fantasy: not to arrive in body. I opted out, read up
on polar bears, the ethics of carrying a rifle, & who should
be shot—you or me. ‘If it was me, I’d let myself be mauled,
struck in the temple.’ If I stayed my pain could play out like
an aeolian harp: a martyr through the insistence of my heart.
Patrick Wright currently works at the Open University, where he teaches English Literature and Creative Writing, alongside working on a second PhD in Creative Writing. He is the author of Full Sight Of Her and his poems have been published in magazines, including Agenda, Wasafiri, The Reader, and The High Window. Wright’s poem ‘The End’ appears in the Best New British and Irish Poets 2018 anthology, published by Eyewear Publishing, and he has previously been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize.