‘Watching Morse on Endeavour’ by Karen Rigby

nowhere is safe in 1960’s Oxford. Not the boat house
or boarding school, wooded path, 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.

From issue #10: autumn/winter 2020

About the Author
Karen Rigby is the author of Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press). Her poems have been published in Australian Book Review, The Manchester Review, The London Magazine, The Spectacle and other journals. She lives in Arizona.