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

     I saw her name in a book of Cavafy poems.

     Her address in Montreal. She had initials like the poet on the frontispiece. Since I didn't know her sex I felt satisfied.

     The voice was boyish, but what did that mean.

     She came to the phone. She spoke in an idiosyncratic French and I hung up.

     I wrote to her anyway. She liked my exuberance. Said she didn’t miss Cavafy. She preferred Queneau: Cent Mille Millards de Poems.

     An aspiring writer and an artist of sorts, abstract expressionist, I told her, not an ex con like my best friend Thomas who was a pacifist during the Vietnam war.

     He worked at the library. I told him about buying Cavafy for a quarter in a used bookstore. Great poets for small change, he once said.

     I showed Thomas the picture of Yvette. He wanted to take his jeep up to Montreal. We agreed to go after lunch.

     Yvette was not surprised to see me. She was wearing white which I thought was stranger still for the fact her brother Charles wore black.

     Charles gave Thomas and me wine. Yvette did not drink. She was playing in a production of Racine we went to see that night. Thomas went backstage to Yvette during the intermission, and they married soon after.

     I wanted Charles to come to America. He acted in my first play, “Ten Minutes in the Life of Vichy.”

     Yvette called in on a snowy January night and said Thomas her for an understudy.

     She came to stay with Charles and me. She was with child.

     Thomas came to the christening with the understudy, Michelle. Charles knew Michelle from acting school. They fell in love, and Charles went back to Canada.

     To be a father, Thomas was not in his class act. And I, helping Yvette with the baby, have never forgiven myself for having picked up Cavafy.