On the flyleaf of Submariner #36 (c.1971)

Once at Easter or maybe autumn
with the railway-line on my right
and on my left the flat silver-grey of the firth
I walked past Stark's Park and the Teil Burn
across the Auchtertool road
almost as far as the colliery gates
(the road running on till it twisted
under the railway-bridge and uphill)
to the paper-shop which I'd found stocked everything

Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Doctor Doom,
the Daredevil, the Avengers and the X-Men,
occasional villains who'd been transformed
into titular if flawed heroes, mutants
whose power derived as likely as not
from an accident in the lab
(a touch of the Jekylls about most of them)
and which, whatever it enabled them to achieve,
removed them from the everyday ground

and there were those of mythical stock
like Atlantean Namor the Submariner
whose real source of power whatever
superhuman strength he had accrued
lay in his uncontrollable rage
and though I don't remember much of the story
I remember that when he found at the end of #36
his wife fatally injured and at the start of #37
his wife untransformably dead, I understood
whether or not she'd appear in the odd flashback
neither willpower nor weird science would resurrect her.

Now, passing through on the train
no shop to be seen and the pit
long since closed, I imagine
the abandoned tunnels that run for miles
beneath the sea-bed, and think
how deceptively easy it was in the end to leave,
and that however you try to return (willpower
or weird science), the scene's as altered as was, say,
the original Doctor Strange from his later, redrawn, self.
 

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