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

     The last time I came up here was about mid-morning on Saturday week.  There was a father and his two small children, each wheeling a bicycle up to the dislodged bough on the far side of the horses’ field.

     I watched them for a while as I stood beside the farmhouse with its foundations choked by nettles and the entire perimeter surrounded by barbed wire.  The cobwebbed windows and bricked-in doorway revealed nothing.  Yet more than once I felt your steel-cold stare and eventually returned to the path.

     Yes, I suppose in a way I could be called an impostor.  But what motivates me into taking this path is the question that has been lingering in my subconscious since I first saw you strolling in the heat haze. Tall and stooped.  Wearing a russet overcoat and black, wide-brimmed hat on a morning that promised little respite from the sun.

     When my German Shepherd stopped in its tracks I saw the black dog at your heel.  It looked neither left nor right.  But, for that matter, neither did you.

     Although tall, you merged easily into the cove of hawthorn thickets and I admit to having lengthened my stride because I would have liked to have spent some time talking.  Just leaning on the stile and taking in the view while putting the world to rights.  Had we the time-slipped opportunity, we would no doubt have found ourselves describing two entirely different lives evolving within the same landscape.  Yourself highlighting the boredom that derived from following the dung-plastered rear quarters of fifty or sixty cows each day.  Silently praying for a full harvest.  After which you harnessed yourself to the ploughshares and walked eleven to fifteen miles, six days of the week as you turned raw stubble into straight furrows.  As for myself, well I’d probably be enthusing about fax machines and internal combustion.  Pointing to the motorway down there and mentioning the fact that due to the planning and form of modern technology, I can be in London - yes, London - in less than two hours.

     But that derelict farmhouse and its outbuildings over to our left;  what a splendid place in which to have brought up your children.  And how I would have envied their hide-and-seek games around the stables and barns because, you know, as a child I had always yearned to be exploring stables, pigsties and granaries.

     So what suddenly provoked you?  What caused the mental fire to ignite from a tiny spark to a soul-possessing inferno?  Tell me that.

     You raged.  And I’m saying you had a right to.  All land workers had a right to.  If your knees weren’t skinned then you suffered blistered hands and excruciating backache - especially after ploughing.

     And in those last years you walked with a stoop.  That much I do know because that is how you were walking up there on the path the other morning.

     Did all this lead to the mental spring that was suddenly released, like the animal screams erupting from your throat?  Wearing your black wide-brimmed hat and russet overcoat you went suddenly berserk and stood screaming, cursing and banging the wall with your fists.  Everything blacked out but your oaths.  Yet your trembling fingers were suddenly and deftly easing the cartridges into the shotgun’s breach.  Then she ran at you screaming.  Am I right?

     Suddenly the explosion.  The recoil.  The wailing.  The blood.  And the disbelief.  Your wife on her knees, sobbing.  Dripping trails of dark red on to lighter red tiles.  No, you couldn’t have!  But you did.  You shot her.  Remember?  Then as your terrified little children burst into the room you spent a bullet on each one.  Loading.  Reloading.  And shooting them each in the head.

     Having then used all the ammunition you later did what some would have described as being the honourable thing before others did it for you.  In the big dusty-topped chest along with the harnesses, horse brasses, pick and shovel you found it.  The rope.  And being a land worker you were obviously good with rope.  Especially knots.  In your case, a hangman’s knot.

     Were you sweating?  Cold?  Trembling?  Crying?  Was it a day of heat haze much like we are experiencing of late?  Or were there troughs of metallic grey clouds blowing in from the west?  Perhaps it was night and pitch black?

     Anyway, which of these oaks did you choose?  I don’t really know why I’ve asked you that since more than once I’ve complained about the morbidity of people who, with their families, will drive hundreds of miles on a Sunday to sit gazing at the spot where twenty or thirty poor souls lost their lives in an air crash.

     So, oak tree apart, this ruined farm serves as a monument anyway to your family - your despair, and your bravery in having actually put that noose around your neck, tested it, weighed it then kicked out towards oblivion.

     Christ!  You were brave to have chosen the choking death.  Brave, foolhardy or mentally displaced.  And when the rope was tightening - tightening, and you were gasping for air - gasping for air, striving - striving for air, did you suddenly change your mind?  But too late?  Or did you find yourself looking down upon your corpse?  A swaying scarecrow swathed in a russet overcoat.  Its bulging eyes partially shadowed by the wide brim of the black hat.  Face darkening by the minute.  Tongue lolling sideways as its last droplets of saliva lured the gnats and midges in to drink.

     And the black dog.  Did you shoot that too?  Or allow it to perish?  Whichever, it is still by your side when you walk the path these mornings.

     Yet your strength somehow never deserted you.  Something unknown, unseen, revives your image.  Could that be your spiritual or personal strength holding you to the place where you had known the contentment that turned gradually to personal failure?

     Strange though that none of the footpath walkers have seen your face for you keep your head lowered, its facial expression merging into the shadows created by the brim of your hat.  But what we have surmised is that you walk this same path as ourselves, some time around the beginning of the century.  We believe this because there are those among us who have seen you walking straight through the stile which we have to climb.

     Here at the farm, however, you share your secret with no one.  You are in possession because it is your home.  Yes, I can still feel your eyes.  Your presence here.  Around the ruins which have never been rebuilt or lived in because you have never left them.  And somehow the entire local community seem to know this which is probably why so few choose to walk the footpath circuit despite its close proximity.

     You’re there now aren’t you?  In one of the rooms.  Dominant and watchful in the daylight.  Perhaps raging and berserk in the blackness of night.  And like myself, leaving the house just after first light, to walk the footpath in the heat haze.