nowhere is safe in 1960’s Oxford. Not the boat house
or boarding school, cheap flat, church floor,
doesn’t matter, we’re all going the way of the dead
with lipstick or pulped heads, torso slashed
by a wayward tiger. The clue isn’t always a cipher.
The background a green-lit riverbank, estate
gone to seed in that harvest light. Regret pulls
like a freighter, which is why a question
with no answer—who couldn’t you save?—
echoes into me. When a black Jaguar cases
the alley, the orchestra slows. I’m waiting,
like you, for the closing minutes when an actor
casts an empirical gaze and every fact locks
into place. That’s what I’m missing when I consider
my past as a forensic scene: there’s no one but me
to trace what a chalk mark means. Remember
when a stolen Fabergé egg twined with revenge?
How it killed the murderer to remember
but it’s worse to forget? The girl I can’t bring back
cut her own hair in the mirror: that specific,
calculated blame, so that the only way to live
was to live. In TV mysteries, everyone gets
what’s coming. Here, a crime happens with no
atmospherics, languid as love.
© Karen Rigby
First published in Banshee.