Glad of These Times Read online

  HELEN DUNMORE

  GLAD OF THESE TIMES

  A celebrated winner of fiction’s Orange Prize, Helen Dunmore is as spellbinding a storyteller in her poetry as in her novels. Glad of These Times is full of haunting, joyous and wry narratives. These poems explore the fleetingness of life, its sweetness and intensity, the short time we have on earth and the pleasures of the earth, and death as the frame which sharpens everything and gives it shape.

  Glad of These Times was Helen Dunmore’s first poetry book after Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001, her comprehensive selection drawing on seven previous collections. It brings together poems of great lyricism, feeling and artistry. It has since been followed by The Malarkey (2012).

  ‘Dunmore is a particularly lucid writer, and not simply because her poems are so often filled with the play of light. Her language is bare and clean; her forms balladic and unobtrusive… Dunmore seeks to draw attention, not to her mastery of craft, but to her subject and the intricate, original, patterns of her thought…These poems are light-boned, but strong: elegant, complex, fully-turned unions of image, thought and sound. In these times, we should be glad of this voice’

  – KATE CLANCHY, Guardian.

  COVER PAINTING

  Window with Distant Sea by Felicity Mara

  COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

  Helen Dunmore

  GLAD OF THESE TIMES

  For Maurice Dunmore

  1928–2006

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications, in which some of these poems first appeared: Being Alive: the sequel to ‘Staying Alive’ (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), City: Bristol Today in Poems and Pictures (Paralalia, 2004), La Traductière, Light Unlocked: Christmas Card Poems (Enitharmon Press, 2005), The Long Field (Great Atlantic Publications), New Delta Review, Poetry (Chicago), Poetry Review and The Way You Say the World: A Celebration for Anne Stevenson (Shoestring Press, 2003).

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  City lilacs

  Crossing the field

  Litany

  Don’t count John among the dreams

  The other side of the sky’s dark room

  Convolvulus

  The grey lilo

  Yellow butterflies

  Plume

  Odysseus

  The blue garden

  Violets

  The rowan

  Barnoon

  Getting into the car

  Glad of these times

  Off-script

  ‘Indeed we are all made from the dust of stars’

  Tulip

  Beautiful today the

  Dead gull on Porthmeor

  Narcissi

  Dolphins whistling

  Borrowed light

  A winter imagination

  Athletes

  Pneumonia

  Wall is the book

  Gorse

  Blackberries after Michaelmas

  To my nine-year-old self

  Fallen angel

  Bridal

  Still life with ironing

  Spanish Irish

  Cowboys

  Below Hungerford Bridge

  Ophelia

  Winter bonfire

  One A.M.

  Lemon and stars

  Cutting open the lemons

  Hearing owls

  ‘Often they go just before dawn’

  May voyage

  About the Author

  Copyright

  City lilacs

  In crack-haunted alleys, overhangs,

  plots of sour earth that pass for gardens,

  in the space between wall and wheelie bin,

  where men with mobiles make urgent conversation,

  where bare-legged girls shiver in April winds,

  where a new mother stands on her doorstep and blinks

  at the brightness of morning, so suddenly born –

  in all these places the city lilacs are pushing

  their cones of blossom into the spring

  to be taken by the warm wind.

  Lilac, like love, makes no distinction.

  It will open for anyone.

  Even before love knows that it is love

  lilac knows it must blossom.

  In crack-haunted alleys, in overhangs,

  in somebody’s front garden

  abandoned to crisp packets and cans,

  on landscaped motorway roundabouts,

  in the depth of parks

  where men and women are lost in transactions

  of flesh and cash, where mobiles ring

  and the deal is done – here the city lilacs

  release their sweet, wild perfume

  then bow down, heavy with rain.

  Crossing the field

  To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.

  RUSSIAN PROVERB

  To cross the field on a sunset of spider-webs

  sprung and shining, thistle heads

  white with tufts that are harvest

  tended and brought to fruit by no one,

  to cross the long field as the sun goes down

  and the whale-back Scillies show damson

  twenty miles off, as the wind sculls

  out back, and five lighthouses

  one by one open their eyes,

  to cross the long field as it darkens

  when rooks are homeward, and gulls

  swing out from the tilt of land

  to the breast of ocean – now is the time

  the vixen stirs, and the green lane’s

  vivid with footprints.

  A field is enough to spend a life in.

  Harrow, granite and mattress springs,

  shards and bones, turquoise droppings

  from pigeons that gorge on nightshade berries,

  a charm of goldfinch, a flight of linnets,

  fieldfare and January redwing

  venturing westward in the dusk,

  all are folded in the dark of the field,

  all are folded into the dark of the field

  and need more days

  to paint them, than life gives.

  Litany

  For the length of time it takes a bruise to fade

  for the heavy weight on getting out of bed,

  for the hair’s grey, for the skin’s tired grain,

  for the spider naevus and drinker’s nose

  for the vocabulary of palliation and Macmillan

  for friends who know the best funeral readings,

  for the everydayness of pain, for waiting patiently

  to ask the pharmacist about your medication

  for elastic bandages and ulcer dressings,

  for knowing what to say

  when your friend says how much she still misses him,

  for needing a coat although it is warm,

  for the length of time it takes a wound to heal,

  for the strange pity you feel

  when told off by the blank sure faces

  of the young who own and know everything,

  for the bare flesh of the next generation,

  for the word ‘generation’, which used to mean nothing.

  Don’t count John among the dreams

  (i.m. John Kipling, son of Rudyard Kipling,

  who died in the Battle of Loos in 1915)

  Don’t count John among the dreams

  a parent cherishes for his children –

  that they will be different from him,

  not poets but the stuff of poems.

  Don’t count John among the dreams

  of leaders, warriors, eagle-eyed stalkers

  picking up the track of
lions.

  Even in the zoo he can barely see them –

  his eyes, like yours, are half-blind.

  Short, obedient, hirsute

  how he would love to delight you.

  He reads every word you write.

  Don’t count John among your dreams.

  Don’t wangle a commission for him,

  don’t wangle a death for him.

  He is barely eighteen.

  Without his spectacles, after a shell-blast,

  he will be seen one more time

  before the next shell sees to him.

  Wounding, weeping from pain,

  he will be able to see nothing.

  And you will always mourn him.

  You will write a poem.

  You will count him into your dreams.

  The other side of the sky’s dark room

  On the other side of the sky’s dark room

  a monstrous finger

  of lightning plays war.

  As clay quivers

  beaded with moisture

  where the spade slices it

  the night quivers.

  Late, towards midnight, a door slams

  on the other side of the sky’s dark room.

  The spade stretchers

  raw earth, helpless to ease

  the dark, inward explosion.

  Convolvulus

  I love these flowers that lie in the dust.

  We think the world is what we wish it is,

  we think that where we say flowers, there will be flowers,

  where we say bombs, there will be nothing

  until we turn to reconstruction.

  But here on the ground, in the dust

  is the striped, lilac convolvulus.

  Believe me, how fragrant it is,

  the flower of coming up from the beach.

  There in the dust the convolvulus squeezes itself shut.

  You go by, you see nothing, you are tired

  from that last swim too late in the evening.

  Where we say bombs, there will be bombs.

  The only decision is where to plant them –

  these flowers that grow at the whim of our fingers –

  but not the roving thread of the convolvulus,

  spun from a source we cannot trace.

  Below, at the foot of the cliff

  the sea laps up the apron of sand

  which was our day’s home. Where we said land

  water has come, where we said flower

  and snapped our fingers, there came nothing.

  I love these flowers that lie in the dust

  barefaced at noon, candid convolvulus

  lilac and striped and flattened underfoot.

  Crushed, they breathe out their honey, and slowly

  come back to themselves in the balm of the night.

  But a lumber of engines grows in the seaward sky –

  how huge the engines, huge the shadow of planes.

  The grey lilo

  The grey lilo with scarlet and violet

  paintballed into its hollows, on which

  my daughter floats, from which her delicate wrist

  angles, while her hand sculls the water,

  the grey lilo where my daughter floats,

  her wet hair smooth to her skull,

  her eyes closed, their dark lashes

  protecting her from the sky’s envy

  of their sudden, staggering blue,

  the grey lilo, misted with condensation,

  idly shadows the floor of the pool

  as if it had a journey to go on –

  but no, it is only catching the echo

  of scarlet and violet geraniums,

  and my daughter is only singing

  under her breath, and the time that settles

  like yellow butterflies, is only

  just about to move on –

  Yellow butterflies

  They are the sun’s fingerprints on grey pebbles

  two yards from the water,

  dabbed on the eucalyptus, the olive,

  the cracked pot of marigolds,

  and now they pulse again, sucking

  dry the wild thyme,

  or on a sightless bird, not yet buried

  they feast a while.

  If they have a name, these yellow butterflies,

  they do not want it; they know what they are,

  quivering, sated, and now once more

  printing sun, sun, and again sun

  in the olive hollows.

  Plume

  If you were to reach up your hand,

  if you were to push apart the leaves

  turning aside your face like one who looks

  not at the sun but where the sun hides –

  there, where the spider scuttles

  and the lizard whips out of sight –

  if you were to search

  with your small, brown, inexperienced hands

  among the leaves that shield the fire of the fruit

  in a vault of shadow, if you were to do it

  you’d be allowed, for this is your planet

  and you are new on it,

  if you were to reach inside the leaves

  and cup your hands as the fruit descends

  like a balloon on the fields of evening

  huffing its orange plume

  one last time, as the flight ends

  and the fruit stops growing –

  Odysseus

  For those who do not write poems

  but have the cause of poems in them:

  this thief, sly as Odysseus

  who puts out from Albanian waters

  into the grape-dark Ionian dawn,

  his dirty engine coughing out puffs of black,

  to maraud, as his ancestors taught him,

  the soft villas of the south –

  The blue garden

  ‘Doesn’t it look peaceful?’ someone said

  as our train halted on the embankment

  and there was nothing to do but stare

  at the blue garden.

  Blue roses slowly opened,

  blue apples glistened

  beneath the spreading peacock of leaves.

  The fountain spat jets of pure Prussian

  the decking was made with fingers of midnight

  the grass was as blue as Kentucky.

  Even the children playing

  in their ultramarine paddling-pool

  were touched by a cobalt Midas

  who had changed their skin

  from the warm colours of earth

  to the azure of heaven.

  ‘Don’t they look happy?’ someone said,

  as the train manager apologised

  for the inconvenience caused to our journey,

  and yes, they looked happy.

  Didn’t we wish we were in the blue garden

  soaked in the spray of the hose-snake,

  didn’t we wish we could dig in the indigo earth

  for sky-coloured potatoes,

  didn’t we wish our journey was over

  and we were free to race down the embankment

  and be caught up in the blue, like those children

  who shrank to dots of cerulean

  as our train got going.

  Violets

  Sometimes, but rarely, the ancestors

  who set my bones, and that kink

  where my parting won’t stay straight – strangers

  whose blood beats like mine –

  call out for flowers

  after the work of a lifetime.

  Many lifetimes, and I don’t know them –

  the pubs they kept, the market stalls they abandoned,

  the cattle driven and service taken,

  the mines and rumours and disappearances

  of men gone looking for work.

  If they left papers, these have dissolved.

  Maybe on census nights they were walking

  fr
om town to town, on their way elsewhere.

  Where they left their bones, who knows.

  I can call them up, but they won’t answer.

  They want the touch of other hands, that rubbed

  their quick harsh lives to brightness.

  They have no interest in being ancestors.

  They have given enough.

  But this I know about: a bunch of violets

  laid on a grave, and a woman walking,

  and black rain falling on the headstone

  of ‘the handsomest man I’ve ever seen’.

  The rowan

  (in memory of Michael Donaghy)

  The rowan, weary of blossoming

  is thick with berries now, in bronze September

  where the sky has been left to harden,

  hammered, ground down

  to fine metal, blue-tanned.

  In the nakedness beneath the rowan

  grow pale cyclamen

  and autumn crocus, bare-stemmed.

  Beaten, fragile, the flowers still come

  eager for blossoming.

  Weary of blossoming, the rowan

  holds its blood-red tattoo of berries.

  No evil can cross this threshold.

  The rowan, the lovely rowan

  will bring protection.

  Barnoon