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

     I can always picture the sun. When it’s darkest night or brightest day when nobody dares look, my sun is there, shape of the child’s smiling star that it is. I’m no sun worshipper, just know there is no dark side if you keep the sun in view.

     When my father died, I opened the curtains into our darkened rooms, let the sun in, and was beaten; only by my mother, though, not by the feisty majesty of death. Years later, my wife’s nan died. The family sat shivah - as a non-believer I was exempt, but I sat too on a low stool, thinking of how she made a chink in the design of our little world, ushered us through to the space she left behind.

     My wife was called Lael, two definite articles run together to shape her personality. She spent years defining mine for me, and I went along with that. After all, she had led me into a temple, I used to think, into its dome that soared into the heavens, sun streaming through its windows. One day I discovered that we were in its crypt, the door locked on us. I suspected then that she had sold the temple above us to developers. She said I didn’t work hard enough. She said sleeping in the afternoons was not healthy for a man of my age - had I turned into my own child? She said if I wanted to create, why didn’t I stop painting, and make a child with her? I’d seen the children that occurred in her family, though; their faces augured greed and evil, and the end of the world. I was not going to father the antichrist.

     I woke and walked in the parks among wasters and crusties, and women silenced by children. I saw Lael’s nan, and the vanished grandad she’d called Papa, walking in Clissold Park; as the sun came out from the clouds, I envied them the love they had, in a simpler time.

     From then on, Lael kept telling me I wasn’t the man she thought I was; I wasn’t even the man I thought I was, my vision blocked by the sun. She said I couldn’t love her - I didn’t have the will, she said. Without the sun, you can’t mark time anymore, so I slept more and more, and don’t know how long this went on. Lael got so pissed off at the sight of my sleeping form that she poked it awake one afternoon to tell me she was leaving.

     Out in the light, I found a world populated by women. One of them would want me, and one of them did. I met her in Finsbury Park on the day of the eclipse, but I didn’t take that as a bad omen. She wore the flat shoes and black ankle socks of the frumme women of Stamford Hill, had their wig-shaped hair, which she covered sometimes with a headscarf to give the appearance of the Turkish women of Green Lanes - I liked this pentimento of London’s multiculture in her. Her name was Roma, and she was from a country of pacifists and communists, coups and confusion, castles, drinkers of blood. She had also come from a cruel marriage to an old, failed architect, a man seriously degenerated by the burnout of his star. It took me some time to realise that she was bringing them all with her. She was unique, a holy insomniac hungry for the voice of the moon; in our conversations, the sun and moon caught up with each other’s gossip. I should have known that you couldn’t put together two beings that rely on each other’s absence for their life, but... well, I don’t see the dark side, and my favourite time of day was often when I was just going to bed, with the sun up but the moon still there.

     Roma talked back to the moon, persuaded it to light us through long, manic nights when her cunt, as she liked to say, cried out all the time for me. She got me to put my ear to it, but all I could ever hear up there was the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. I did my best to liberate them, but really didn’t know what they had to complain about; there were worse places to be.

     When we landed on Earth from Venus, we shared the illusions of our crazy love. We knew that illusions were simply the dark angels of delusion, but we ventured into them. Angels being absurd creatures of whim, I knew that what I would do was drag them out into the light and dose them with UV and ozone, force them to smile on us.

     It would take a fellow-artist like Roma to have patience with me, I thought. We didn’t only spend nights and days in bed; we spent them among primer and paint, glue and charcoal. You inspire me, we told each other, and in my case it was true: I was redeemed. However, I looked at her work puzzled; it was always a message from herself to herself, and I asked, do you want to communicate? She never answered that question.

     There was a feeling I began to get, especially when I was absorbed in work, that she was watching me. I would look up, though, and there she would be, engrossed in a sketchpad, or, increasingly, in cyberspace versions of the esoteric arts. When I wasn’t with her, I had the same feeling, but then I felt comforted and strong. You were thinking of me, I would say, and she had the magic in her sometimes stunted English to deny it, and yet put over that I was right. Then something in the frank way she studied me began to disturb me, reducing me often to a child’s irritable what, what?

     Do some work, I scolded her, and she claimed she was. Her paintings lay abandoned, though, or washed over in night-time blue. She was captive more often to that cod esoterica; Tarot to link her to past and future - only, in fact, to the floor, when she spread the cards and stayed for hours inside their firewalls; the Kabbala - not put off by white-whiskered rabbis claiming they were still on the fringes of it, she had mastered it in a month; astrological charts that set her head adrift in space; the patterns and certainties in numbers. It’s all shit, she said cheerfully, robbing me of the words, and we laughed them off together.

     I had to stop laughing though when the accumulation of patterns began telling Roma I had made eyes at her best friend. The mischievous moon told her then that I was having a gay thing with one of my friends. The moon, stars and planets combined their gossip to let her know I flirted shamelessly with any woman that caught my eye, and would at the drop of a brush desert her to sleep with them all. Protected by the glib fiction of a night prowler at home, she even took to inspecting me in the middle of the night, just to check. When the moon withdrew its counsel, she apologised in her gracious old-world way. And then it would all begin again.

     What was needed from me, I began to sense, was confession, just like in the show trials with which they entertained the masses back in the Cold War climate in which she was born. I could own up to the worst crimes to serve a greater good of which I had no understanding or part; what mattered only was that they should be things I hadn’t done. I could let her paranoia impose its lies on my own truth, and then all would be fine. Until it began again.

     I can forget you just like that, she liked to threaten me. Well, I thought, if I got over fifteen years of Lael in an hour, that gives you about twenty seconds, and that was all it seemed to take, one evening on the Piccadilly line when our steps found separate exits.

     It should have worked; her flawed Eastern Orthodoxy and my lapsed Catholicism, her thirty-something and my forty-something, her moon, my sun and it nearly did. I had those dark angels up at the window, ready to push them out into the light. I wasn’t strong enough to do it by myself, but whenever I looked round for Roma to help me, she was slumped in the darkest corner, hair over her face, dreaming of what the moon was going to tell her about me next.

     I don’t have to look up to see the sun. It goes ecstatically through my work, and it’s no accident, my agent says, that my daubs are bought by punters glowing implausibly with nuclear holiday tans. It’s the moon I look at. Sometimes I see Roma’s face in it, nose wrinkled in a disdain for the West that doesn’t disguise her sheer mad compulsion to be here. I know she’s exactly where she wants to be. I see a flock of nightbirds rise from the trees on Hampstead Heath, and the moon makes them into the mosquitoes over the Danube Delta. Still I confess myself happy that, for one cathartic year, Roma wove me into the moon’s paranoid stories, but even happier that she let me out of them before the end, because of course there is no end to the moon.