Inside the Wave Read online

  HELEN DUNMORE

  INSIDE THE WAVE

  To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead – the underworld and the human living world – and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage.

  Inside the Wave is Helen Dunmore’s tenth and final poetry book, her first since The Malarkey (2012), whose title-poem won the National Poetry Competition. Her other books include Glad of These Times (2007) and Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001).

  Cover photograph by Helen Dunmore

  HELEN DUNMORE

  Inside the Wave

  for Susan Glickman

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications and websites where some of these poems first appeared: Acumen, The Guardian, Hwaet! 20 Years of Ledbury Poetry Festival, ed. Mark Fisher (Bloodaxe Books/Ledbury Poetry Festival, 2016), London Magazine, 1914: Poetry Remembers, ed. Carol Ann Duffy (Faber & Faber, 2014), 100 Prized Poems: twenty-five years of the Forward Books, ed. William Sieghart (Faber & Faber, 2016), and The Poetry Review.

  Several of the poems were broadcast on The Verb (BBC Radio 3). ‘Hold out your arms’ was published in The Guardian and read on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row.

  CONTENTS

  Title page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Counting Backwards

  The Underworld

  Shutting the Gate

  In Praise of the Piano

  Re-opening the old mines

  Inside the Wave

  Odysseus to Elpenor

  Plane tree outside Ward 78

  The shaft

  Leave the door open

  My life’s stem was cut

  The Bare Leg

  The Place of Ordinary Souls

  My daughter as Penelope

  The Lamplighter

  The Halt

  Bluebell Hollows

  A Loose Curl

  Hornsea, 1952

  Festival of stone

  A Bit of Love

  Winter Balcony with Dunnocks

  Mimosa

  Nightfall in the IKEA Kitchen

  The Duration

  At the Spit

  Terra Incognita

  Four cormorants, one swan

  Girl in the Blue Pool

  February 12th 1994

  What shall I do for my sister in the day she shall be spoken for?

  In Secret

  All the breaths of your life

  Her children look for her

  Little papoose

  Cliffs of Fall

  Five Versions from Catullus

  1 Through Babel of Nations

  2 Undone

  3 Sirmio

  4 Dedication

  5 Sparrow

  Rim

  On looking through the handle of a cup

  Ten Books

  Subtraction

  My people

  September Rain

  Hold out your arms

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Counting Backwards

  Untroubled, the anaesthetist

  Potters with his cannula

  As the waterfall in the ante-room

  Grows steadily louder,

  All of them are cool with it

  And just keep on working

  No wonder they wear Wellingtons –

  I want to ask them

  But it seems stupid, naive,

  Even attention-seeking.

  Basalt, I think, the rock

  Where the white stream leaps.

  Imagine living at such volume

  Next door to a waterfall,

  Stepping in and out of the noise

  In their funny clothes.

  But you can get used to anything

  Like the anaesthetist

  Counting to himself

  Backwards, all wrong.

  The Underworld

  And besides, we might play cards:

  Those slapdash games you once taught me

  Which any fool can remember

  Or from the fabric which has been tied

  With string, wrapped in brown paper

  Put away in the highest cupboard

  Since the time the children were young

  And everyone’s children were young

  I might make new curtains

  And hem them all by hand.

  I used to be so afraid of failing

  To grasp the moment, the undertone,

  To look foolish in the eyes of anyone

  But now I like the patter of cards

  The lazy sandwich that falls open

  Halfway to the mouth,

  The refills in a thumbed glass

  The way people get up, yawn,

  Go stiff-legged to the window, wondering

  That it isn’t yet tomorrow

  It’s a long way from here to the river:

  I like to see the fish come in

  But the game is still on.

  From the way the cards are falling

  I’d say you will win.

  I used to think it was a narrow road

  From here to the underworld

  But it’s as broad as the sun.

  I say to you: I have more acquaintance

  Among the dead than the living

  And I am not pretending.

  It’s pure fact, like this sandwich

  Which hasn’t quite tempted anyone.

  Shutting the Gate

  A barefoot girl hugs the wall

  On tiptoe, her instep

  Arched like a cat’s back.

  Nearby a car revs.

  She looks at me and smiles

  Like a primary-school child.

  Her friend smokes by the gate

  One hand on the wall.

  Lissom as lilies, they shake dark curls

  And watch the car.

  I say: Are you girls all right?

  And she says: We don’t like

  The look of them. Two men

  In the dark of the car, also smoking.

  She swings the gate shut.

  They might be my daughters –

  A little older, I reckon –

  But those men don’t look

  Much like the sons of anyone.

  It’s late, almost two a.m.

  They are both inside the gate

  With one shoe-strap broken

  A packet of cigarettes

  Brief lovely dresses.

  I ask: Will you be all right?

  They don’t want to come inside,

  They just didn’t like the gate open

  When those men were waiting

  Like that, with the engine going

  And from time to time a rev

  So we don’t forget.

  In Praise of the Piano

  In praise of the piano that slips out of tune

  I raise my needle from the dusty record

  And watch the vinyl turn and turn,

  In praise of the unrepeatable, the original,

  The one thought clinging to the one word

  I dip my nib into the inkwell,

  In praise of the only known photograph

  Of your great-grandmother, I hoard

  Film, blackout, developing bath.

  O needle jumping on dusty vinyl

  O letter stuffed in dirty pigeonhole

  The fragile, the original

  The one word before the blot falls.

  Finger ballet on the telephone switchboard,

  The one word that flows from the lips

  And the one heart
by which it is heard

  Unrepeatable, fragile. In praise

  Of all that cleaves to the note, then slips

  From it, and never stays.

  Re-opening the old mines

  But you would have to go below

  The bare bright surface. And I suppose

  Out of the dark would come marching

  Men with tattoos

  Of dust on their forearms,

  And as for the gorse burning its own fuse

  Or the boy who drops to his knees

  Shuffling along his seam

  Towards the pock of an explosion

  Heard from above, miles out

  In the fishing grounds,

  He’s in the shop, serving

  Eighty flavours of ice cream.

  Drip drip goes brown water

  Into the shaft while harebells quiver.

  Under the houses there’s a cavern

  So deep that when the camera

  Was lowered it swung pendulum

  While the void kept opening

  But I suppose that in the veiny dark

  Tunnels that knit the rock

  They are still blasting,

  And ponies which never see the light

  Snuff sugar and are content

  As may be among the rare metals:

  Antimony, molybdenum,

  Wolframite, uranium

  Gold, silver and indium.

  Inside the Wave

  And when at last the voyage was over

  The ship docked and the men paid off,

  The crew became a scattering

  Dotted, unremarkable,

  In houses along the hill top

  Where the lamps flared in welcome

  And then grew dim, where a woman turned

  As it from habit to the wall.

  In the bronze mirror there was a woman

  Combing what was left of her hair

  And beside her, grimacing,

  A dirty old mariner.

  He swore and knocked back the chair.

  Yes, then Odysseus opened his mouth

  And all that was left

  Was the sound an old man makes

  Between a laugh and a cough.

  His toenails were goat’s hooves

  His hair a wild

  Nest of old stories,

  He straddled the tiles

  As a man of the sea does

  But she would not touch

  His barnacled lips.

  From the fountain, pulse by pulse

  Came gouts of blood.

  Everything stayed as it was,

  There was no unravelling

  Of wake behind him,

  No abandoning

  Unwanted memories and men.

  Besides, the earth stank.

  He went down to the black rock

  Where the sea pours

  And the white sand blows,

  He turned his back to the land

  And thought of nothing

  For the voyage was over,

  The ship dragged by a chain

  Onto the ramp for inspection.

  The waves turned and turned

  Neither toward nor away from him,

  Swash and backwash

  Crossing, repeating,

  But never the same.

  At the lip of the wave, foam

  Stuttered and broke,

  It was on the inside

  Of the wave he chose

  To meditate endlessly

  Without words or song,

  And so he lay down

  To watch it at eye-level,

  About to topple

  About to be whole.

  Odysseus to Elpenor

  But tell me, Elpenor

  Now that I have conjured you

  From those caverns so deep

  No camera can fathom them

  Now you have come to drink the wine

  Poured on the ground in libation

  And slake your fleshless appetite

  On the snuff of blood,

  Tell me how you came here

  Fleeing like a cloud shadow

  Over restless water –

  You frighten me, Elpenor.

  Look, I have drawn my sword

  Are you not afraid?

  You were a handsome fighter –

  Will you come on?

  Take the heat of my hand

  Elpenor, between your palms.

  Bow your head for a blessing

  Houseless boy, and now tell me

  How you came to die.

  We are not heroes, any of us,

  Only familiars

  Of grey shores and the sea-pulse,

  Laggards, like the tide.

  Was it you, Elpenor

  Who rowed when the wind died

  Until your hands bled?

  You fell asleep in Circe’s house

  Drunk, like all of us,

  Playing the fool

  As you plunged from the roof.

  When your neck broke

  We were already racing

  Down to the harbour

  Where our black ship quivered,

  Even when our sails filled

  And we scudded before the wind

  We could not catch your shadow.

  We had left you behind

  But you are ahead of us

  Waiting, unpropitiated

  Poor boy, unburied

  Come to lap at the blood.

  Dawn pushes away night’s curtain

  Your body must be burned

  And your hair tied with ribbons

  As a remembrance.

  You ask me in the name of my son

  Not to let you be forgotten

  But to build your grave mound

  Where the pebbles meet the tide

  ‘And thrust into its heart my oar

  So that I may row myself forever.’

  Plane tree outside Ward 78

  The tree outside the window

  Is lost and gone,

  Billow of leaf in the summer dark,

  A buffet of rain.

  I might owe this tree to morphine,

  I might wake in the morning

  To find it dissolved, paper

  Hung in water,

  Nothing to do with dreams.

  I cannot sleep.

  Pain is yards away

  Held off like bad weather,

  In the ward’s beautiful contentment

  Freed by opiates.

  Hooked to oxygen

  We live for the moment.

  The shaft

  I don’t need to go to the sun –

  It lies on my pillow.

  Without movement or speech

  Day deepens its sweetness.

  Sea shanties from the water,

  A brush of traffic,

  But it’s quiet here.

  Who would have thought that pain

  And weakness had such gifts

  Hidden in their rough hearts?

  Leave the door open

  Leave the door open! We cheep and command

  From the shared double bed or from the cot

  With bars that make tigers out of the dark.

  We want the fume and coil of your cigarettes,

  The smoke that has embraced us from birth,

  The click of your footsteps on the wooden landing,

  The wedge of light that parts us from the dark

  As I hold, hold to it like a sword.

  Leave the door open. Go downstairs, go out

  After priming the neighbours to listen,

  Go to your world: the cider-bottle cap

  Askew on its stem, the pellucid gin,

  The ashtray overflowing with stubs,

  Radio laughter and suppressed voices

  As you creak upstairs without waking us,

  But don’t forget to leave the light on

  So the spill of it falls where it must.

  We can breathe now in our coffin of she
ets

  So tangled we can’t get out of them,

  As long as you leave the door open.

  My life’s stem was cut

  My life’s stem was cut,

  But quickly, lovingly

  I was lifted up,

  I heard the rush of the tap

  And I was set in water

  In the blue vase, beautiful

  In lip and curve,

  And here I am

  Opening one petal

  As the tea cools.

  I wait while the sun moves

  And the bees finish their dancing,

  I know I am dying

  But why not keep flowering

  As long as I can

  From my cut stem?

  The Bare Leg

  There we sat in the clattering dark

  As the carriages swayed downhill

  Under London’s invisible rivers,

  There our faces were mute

  With a day of burdens

  As we recovered ourselves,

  Some read star signs from a column

  In a left-behind newspaper,

  Some sighed and shut their eyes.

  When the train came to a halt

  For nothing in the dark of the tunnel

  We breathed out silence

  And when the voice came

  Lulling with news of a red signal

  We sighed again and rolled our eyes

  Or adjusted our standing positions

  To lean into one another more gently

  And if we had room to turn our heads

  We looked down the long corridor

  Of carriages aligned