Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Even though Rimbaud was dressed in a coarse black suit with baggy brown pants, the white shirt open at the neck and the buttons as pale as a calf’s eye, I never saw him that way.

His face was a blur and the hair, dark brown, seemed stiff and the way it was situated on his head seemed to be almost an afterthought, a thatch of brown hair only.

When he turned, the cigarette up to his lips, I saw him as a burnt mask with the level brown behind his head dotted with low bushes.

When he wasn’t there, somehow the fuchsias seemed to be him, hanging there with their waxy purple and red and white petals, their peeling paper bark....

And underneath, the stones sparkling with dew, shaped in numbers and embedded in the earth like the dismembered addresses of the dead.

                                                    *

Inside the carriage window panes I could see the dead moving around. Their mouths were worrying on words as if they couldn’t say them. Rimbaud noticed me watching them. He leaned over and pointed at one old man in white, a night shirt, who was twisting his head this way and that like a raw necked bird begging for food.

“This is the manufacturer’s wish. The dead prevent the glass from shattering should we get in a wreck, just as they prevent your mind from shattering when someone dies. The dead are here on earth to protect the living from the shock of dying.”

Suddenly Rimbaud grinned at me as he pretended to say this and I was almost believing him when his teeth began to flow into a rainbow between his lips.

                                                  *

“One of my follies ,“ Rimbaud said. We were watching the line of men at the back of the cave with black rubber bulbs for heads. They were sticking their brass stomachs into the electrical outlets that dotted the wall.  When their bellies fitted the outlet’s indention, they wiggled and squirmed as if in some sort of ecstasy until they dropped exhausted on the damp floor.

                                                  *

To the left of the cave wall was a half finished figure of a heavy woman, her back being already carved in the white limestone, the huge bustle almost a distortion, the face and front still rough and porous.

Down her back were three streams of water, the one in the middle much larger than the two on the sides.

The stone was shaped so the dress seemed to be trying to pull itself free from the damp floor of the cave.

                                                  *

Inside a long corridor I could see the lean white figure of Rimbaud’s mother. For a moment I thought she was a scarecrow but the walls and floor were so dull, not even a glimmer of light along the molding, it was all flat grey, I couldn’t imagine the least bit of greenery there. She had her mouth open and periodically I heard a steam whistle, very loud and very full.

                                                  *

“The Miracle of the waking world,” he said, “is like the neck of a bottle.  Underneath it everything is red and wet and drunken.” He held up a cream-colored bone letter opener, as if to illustrate his point. Seeing my confusion, he laughed and laughed.

                                                  *

Despite the fact that the roof was rather steep, the lawn was growing on both sides of it. We climbed over the side of the giant tea cup that was holding the house and clambered up into the open doorway.

Inside the young lady in white was seated in a chair, right on the edge, her feet spread out, resting on her heels.

She partially undressed, leaving her white slip on, and then, she calmly bent over and unbuttoned Rimbaud’s fly, taking his snub-nosed cock in her mouth as I eased up behind her and raised her slip.

Just as I felt the warmth of her cleft on the head of my cock, I glanced behind me and saw the staircase to the second floor was nothing more than a stiff blue carpet leaning against the white balcony.

                                                   *

Off the path was a puddle of blood, dried black and reflecting all the light back on us. Rimbaud leaned over and inspected it. “A mirror,” he said softly.

                                                    *

Just inside his back there was a discernable hump where the demon lived.  “He is no longer there,” he remarked one day when I was staring at the radio in the corner. I knew what he meant. At the beach I had noticed his sandy spine as he leaned over and regarded the sea with a tender air, “I’d love to be a log, adrift, rolling over and over in the surf, worn smooth....” There was no sign of a scar, just the bumps of his spine, sandy and drying.

                                                 *

“The name ‘CHOCOLATE’ was the one I gave whenever I would find myself face down on the bed, my head literally pounding.” He says this with an expression of bitterness in his face, as if he has just eaten a handful of salt.

                                                  *

“The cables came down from my brain ,“ he explained, “and the curve of them in the sky was like the moon, thin and silvery, that stretched from the tip of my nose up into the front of my brain.

*

“The mother is over here,” he explained, using that patient tone I had come to dislike so much. He opened the wooden slat gate, the long rusty hinges stretched out along the boards like blunt fingers. . . inside the overhang of the rock was a woman, she was nursing some white rags, holding them up to her swollen brown nipples and rocking back and forth.

Rimbaud moved over to her and stared at her intently. Then, with one flick of his black boot, he kicked dust on her.

She raised her eyes to him, her eyes were dark brown and large, and abruptly she turned into a dead cactus stump, the sliced top shriveled and warped around the edges, the center sunken and brown as the water evaporated out of the opening.

*