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

i

Loose at the back of the album, 10 x 8,
your writing - FIRST FIFTEEN RUGBY TEAM
AGE UNDER 18 - and here, in black and white,
it’s seventy-six or -seven: you’re seventeen,
a you I never knew... your younger grin.
I don’t know where you played but I imagine
the gum-shield snarl as you hurtle down the wing,
left arm out to fend off the opposition –

The coach explained to your parents, It didn’t hurt...
A broken collar bone. And your retort?
Well, it didn’t hurt him. They had to cut the shirt
off your back. I’ve got it in a drawer. – Ought
these things belong to me? They are your mother’s.
Picture, shirt and memory - all hers.

ii

That one’s your mother’s, these, my memories.
I was glad that night to hear, In bed fifteen....
your name. Obviously, I shouldn’t have been.
I should have wanted never to hear or read it
again except in notes, reports from clinic:
Oh X was in. He still looks remarkably well.
For, what could have dragged you back to Dalziel
– back to your fellow lymphomas and leukaemics –
other than relapse?

                                 I’m not the only nurse
who’s pleased to see you. You’re a special case,
one of the favourites which we don’t have.
You think we’re helping you, but you help us
each time we catch you laughing in its face
when, on the face of it, it looks so bad.

iii

And on the face of it, it’s looking bad
(cheeks gone in, thin wrists, pyrexial).
I offer you sleepers, paracetamol,
and we share some of such fun as may be had
from watching Jimmy Rosenthal on Sportsnight.
The drug round and its trolley trundle on,
late as usual. We should have had it all done
by now, muted the phones, switched to night-lights.

I pass your bed with IV antibiotics.
What is it about your face pulls at my eyes?
Other, that is, than your own, which are round and brown.
Something. A favourite television comic.
Griff Rhys-Jones as he was in eighty-five –
only even better looking and more dead-pan.

iv

Handsomer than Griff – we’re not joking now –
you sit beside your bed at 3 a.m.
while for the third night running, second time
tonight, we change it head to foot. You frown
at our hands, the sheets. You don’t like this, don’t know
what’s going on. You sweat whenever you sleep.
They’ve marked the skin and they’ve begun to keep
a record of the rate at which it’s growing.

It’s in your spleen, and your belly’s growing fast
as in the middle month of pregnancy.
You get back into bed. What’s going on?
The registrar will not discuss the worst
while you’ve got the option of splenectomy –
Next night when I come in to work, you’re gone.

v

Next night when I come in to work, you’ve gone
to Waring Ward post-surgery, which spares
you from this sight: someone you know – someone
younger than you, from your home town, who shares
your name – in trouble. White as a sheet, bone-white,
and cold to the bone, the sweat is pouring from
his body. – We’re trying to get these right:
painkillers, some sort of privacy, some calm
around them – his parents, his little girlfriend lying
on an empty bed, tired of waiting for death.
Dry-eyed for now, the women, exhausted from crying.
Together, we watch from breath to far-off breath.
His mother nods while I say ...I think...he’s gone...
and turns towards me now, because I’m wrong.

vi

I’m nodding into the phone. Something’s gone wrong:
you started to bleed. They rushed you back to theatre,
says the S.H.O. And this is where I mutter
Bad night for people called Colin and not long
before disgust at even thinking it
kicks in. With all that’s going on up here
it’s hours until we learn you’re still down there.
––Hell of a leak if they haven’t fixed it yet.

It has been a terrible night, terrible.
Some night-shifts are like that. Round 6 o’clock
Night Sister tells us you’re back and you’re OK,
her words down the phone as welcome as that little
lift in the light beyond the windows. Look –
it’s dawn, the morning of St. Valentine’s Day.

vii

It’s Saturday morning and St. Valentine’s Day
but I can’t go home until I’ve checked that you’re –
as well as can be expected. By the door
onto the ward: your mother. She tells me they
are ‘just sorting you out’. They call us in,
your nurses , then move away – smiling, brisk –
leaving you propped between plumped pillows, crisp
white sheets. They too are glad to see you again.

The high percentage oxygen, the widegauge
NG tube – you close your eyes, jerk back
your head...like a flaming elephant! I list
the rest: peripheral and central lines,
oxymeter, chest-leads, two redivacs –
You watch me, nod ... in every orifice!

viii

They’ve gone from almost every orifice
today, those tubes that so affronted you.
But you’re not laughing – and I imagine this,
though partly due to fever, is more to do
with the thoughts I think I see behind your eyes
this morning. Which is why you close them now.
Your right hand rests on the bedclothes at your side.
I cover it with my own. Your hand twists round
to meet mine palm to palm – and you’re holding on.
So I tell you that you’re going to be OK,
that you’ll be out before I’m in again.
Then I’m changed, off-duty, half-way to the gate
when it hits me – and I’m sure it can’t be right
...the kind of man...but it fills my head with light.

This sequence will be continued in our next issue...