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

1
The raincoat I bought you for your birthday was torn. Your nose was broken. Your face was red, purple, bluish grey. You had stepped out to buy me a paper. A paper I should never have asked for. I will never again ask anyone to do something as dangerous as buy me a paper.

Three months later, you are here and not here. We no longer mention what he did as you walked across the village green and turned left. We no longer mention the words he whispered into your ear. Quiet words, flapping their oily wings as you try to sleep. The insistent echo of a whisper, still
trying to become a full voice.

‘She is lucky to be alive,’ my neighbour said. ‘He could have killed her with that hammer.’

Off-kilter words, wild and misshapen, intended to make me feel better.

2
‘This will be my famous blue raincoat,’ you said, laughing, as you tried it on in the shop. ‘Like the song, remember?’

‘Of course I remember.’

How could I not remember? When we went to see Leonard Cohen  near your flat in Paris, you sang along to every word of that song. You were all I could hear. I never understood your obsession with Leonard Cohen, his music is so melancholy, but that’s what makes it beautiful, you said.

3
I remember thinking, at the hospital, as the doctor assessed the wound on your head, that you reminded me of a Rothko painting I had seen twenty years before: Red on Maroon (1959). It was an odd thing to think, a way to disappear, and I am sorry for not staying by your side.

It was on the local news. ‘Woman raped in broad daylight’ – as if the most shocking aspect was daylight’s failure. (But daylight is broad. Daylight is expansive. Daylight keeps us visible and free.) You never hear ‘woman raped in broad darkness’, even though night is as broad as day, especially when Anna is trying to sleep through the insistent whispers.

‘Things like this don’t happen in our village,’ said a local man, speaking into the camera instead of looking at the reporter. ‘We can’t believe this happened here.’

Sometimes the crime is in the timing. Sometimes it is all in the geography.

4
A week later, the world went on as usual. You went home to Paris, telling a revoltingly mundane story about visiting your mother in the English countryside and being hit by a car. ‘I don’t want to be defined by it,’ you said. Three weeks later, your brother got married in Devon and I painted over your bruises with foundation and blusher. Beige on yellowish purple. Pink on beige on yellowish purple. Grotesque. Inappropriate.

‘I wish it had been me instead of you,’ I said.

‘Don’t say that, Mum.’

‘I mean it.’

‘Don’t, Mum.’

I didn’t realise that I hurt you when I said this. I didn’t know that I made you feel alone. Eventually, you would explain.

‘You can only say those things because nothing bad has happened to you. If it had, you’d never say it.’

But it has, Anna.

It has.

Try having a daughter who comes to visit and gets beaten and raped and hit with a hammer when she steps out to buy you a paper.

Try still living in that village.

Try listening to If only this, if only that, all the time, day and night.

Try having a daughter who used to tell you everything, but now you never know what she is thinking or feeling, and your guilt stands between you with yellow skin and red teeth, its tiny mouth crammed full of Rothko.

Try sitting in the sun by your husband’s grave, fiddling with daffodils in a vase, trying not to tell him, wondering if he saw it happen, hoping he didn’t, hoping the dead are just dead because at least then they are safe from the atrocities and the things they should never see or hear. Would he mind if I moved to France? Would he ask how I could leave him behind? The bones, the headstone, the daffodils in a vase – but surely these things are not him?


5
Archie, my West Highland terrier, had been by your side until you let go of his lead. He ran home, the small bearer of unspeakable news. I patted his head, gave him a biscuit, looked out of the window, switched on the radio.

Repulsive behaviour.


6
You used to take Friday off work and stay for a long weekend. We did simple things: food shopping at Sainsbury’s, walking Archie around the lake, renting a film. Now, once every six weeks, I get a coach to London and the Eurostar to Paris. I sit in a café and knit until it is time for you to leave work. I am knitting you a sweater, loose and olive green, like the one you had as a girl, the one you wore until it fell apart.

Just after six o’clock, you take me to a wine bar near your office, and I wish that I had worn something dressier than these trousers, this cardigan, these comfortable shoes. I feel old and dowdy but you are smiling.


7
Today is your fortieth birthday and we have driven to Deauville. I leave you in the water and head back to our blanket on the sand. I wrap myself in a towel, pour coffee from a flask.

For your birthday, you wanted a new raincoat. The sales assistant looked afraid as I handed her the coat and credit card, tears painting black streaks and taupe trails across my face.

I realise, sitting here on the beach, that I keep you captive with my inability to forget. Only one of us is defined by what happened that day, and that person is not you.

I watch you swimming in the sea. Strong breaths, steady strokes; you disappear underwater, you surface for air. It seems too simple.

To my left, a boy is digging deep into the sand while his mother sleeps. To my right, a woman is sitting in a deckchair reading Revolutionary Road. The blue sky is unbroken. Floating on your back, you look over and wave.