Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 Read online

  The flowers stay open with slim leaves flickering around them:

  touched and used, they bear fruit.

  A pæony truss on Sussex Place

  Restless, the pæony truss tosses about

  in a destructive spring wind.

  Already its inner petals are white

  without one moment of sun-warmed expansion.

  The whole bunch of the thing looks poor

  as a stout bare-legged woman in November

  slopping her mules over the post office step

  to cash a slip of her order book.

  The wind rips round the announced site

  for inner city conversion: this is the last tough

  bit of the garden, with one lilac

  half sheared-off and half blooming.

  The AIDS ad is defaced and the Australian

  lager-bright billboard smirks down

  on wind-shrivelled passersby who stayed put

  to vote in the third Thatcher election.

  The porch of the Elim Pentecostal Church brightens

  as a woman in crimson and white suit

  steps out, pins her hat down

  then grasps the hands of her wind-tugged grandchildren.

  Permafrost

  For all frozen things –

  my middle finger that whitens

  from its old, ten-minute frostbite,

  for black, slimy potatoes

  left in the clamp,

  for darkness and cold like cloths

  over the cage,

  for permafrost, lichen crusts

  nuzzled by reindeer,

  the tender balance of decades

  null as a vault.

  For all frozen things –

  the princess and princes

  staring out of their bunker

  at the original wind,

  for NATO survivors in nuclear moonsuits

  whirled from continent to continent

  like Okies in bumpy Fords

  fleeing the dustbowl.

  For all frozen things –

  snowdrops and Christmas roses

  blasted down to the germ

  of their genetic zip-code.

  They fly by memory –

  cargo of endless winter,

  clods of celeriac, chipped

  turnips, lanterns at ten a.m.

  in the gloom of a Finnish market lace;

  flowers under glass, herring,

  little wizened apples.

  For all frozen things –

  the nipped fish in a mess of ice,

  the uncovered galleon

  tossed from four centuries of memory,

  or nuclear snowsuits bouncing on dust,

  trapped on the rough ride of the earth’s surface,

  on the rough swing of its axis,

  like moon-men lost on the moon

  watching the earth’s green flush

  tremble and perish.

  At Cabourg

  Later my stepson will uncover a five-inch live shell

  from a silted pool on the beach at St Côme. It is complete

  with brass cap and a date on it: nineteen forty-three.

  We’ll look it up in the dictionary, take it

  to show at the Musée de la Libération

  – ce petit obus – but once they unwrap it

  they’ll drop the polite questions and scramble

  full tilt for the Gendarmerie opposite.

  The gendarmes will peer through its cradle of polythene

  gingerly, laughing. One’s at the phone

  already – he gestures – ‘Imagine! Let’s tell them

  we’ve got a live shell here in the Poste!’

  Of course this will have happened before.

  They’ll have it exploded, there’ll be no souvenir shell-case,

  and we’ll be left with our photographs

  taken with a camera which turns out to be broken.

  Later we’ll be at the Château Fontaine-Henry

  watching sleek daughters in jodhpurs come in from the fields.

  I’ll lie back in my green corduroy coat, and leave,

  faint, to drive off through fields of sunflowers

  without visiting the rooms we’ve paid for.

  Madame will have her fausse-couche,

  her intravenous injections, her glass ampoules,

  in a room which is all bed

  and smells of medicinal alcohol and fruit.

  The children will play on the beach, a little forlornly,

  in the wind which gusts up out of nowhere.

  Later we’ll see our friends on their lightweight bicycles

  freewheeling tiredly downhill to Asnelles.

  Their little son, propped up behind them

  will glide past, silent, though he alone sees us.

  But now we are on the beach at Cabourg,

  stopped on our walk to look where the sky’s whitening

  over the sea beyond Dives. Now a child squawks

  and races back as a wave slaps over his shorts’ hem

  to where a tanned woman with naked breasts

  fidgets her baby’s feet in the foam

  straight down from the Boulevard Marcel Proust.

  Ploughing the roughlands

  It’s not the four-wheeled drive crawler

  spitting up dew and herbs,

  not Dalapon followed by dressings

  of dense phosphates,

  nor ryegrass greening behind wire as behind glass,

  not labourers wading in moonsuits

  through mud gelded by paraquat –

  but now, the sun-yellow, sky-blue

  vehicles mount the pale chalk,

  the sky bowls on the white hoops

  and white breast of the roughland,

  the farmer with Dutch eyes

  guides forward the quick plough.

  Now, flush after flush of Italian ryegrass

  furs up the roughland

  with its attentive, bright,

  levelled-off growth –

  pale monoculture

  sweating off rivers of filth

  fenced by the primary

  colours of crawler and silo.

  The land pensions

  The land pensions, like rockets

  shoot off from wheat with a soft yellow

  flame-bulb: a rook or a man in black

  flaps upwards with white messages.

  On international mountains and spot markets

  little commas of wheat translate.

  The stony ground’s pumped to a dense fire

  by the flame-throwing of chemicals.

  On stony ground the wheat can ignite

  its long furls.

  The soft rocket of land pensions flies

  and is seen in Japan, covering

  conical hills with its tender stars:

  now it is firework time, remembrance

  and melt-down of autumn chrysanthemums.

  On bruised fields above Brighton

  grey mould laces the wheat harvest.

  The little rockets are black. Land pensions

  fasten on silos elsewhere, far off.

  Market men flicker and skulk like eels

  half-way across earth to breed.

  On thin chipped flint-and-bone land

  a nitrate river laces the grey wheat

  pensioning off chalk acres.

  A dream of wool

  Decoding a night’s dreams

  of sheepless uplands

  the wool-merchant clings to the wool churches,

  to trade with the Low Countries,

  to profitable, downcast

  ladies swathed in wool sleeves

  whose plump, light-suffused faces

  gaze from the triptychs he worships.

  Sheep ticks, maggoty tails and foot-rot

  enter his tally of dense beasts, walking

  with a winter’s weight on their backs

  through stubborn pasture

&
nbsp; they graze to a hairsbreadth.

  From the turf of the Fire Hills

  the wool-merchant trawls

  sheep for the marsh markets.

  They fill mist with their thin cries –

  circular eddies, bemusing

  the buyers of mutton

  from sheep too wretched to fleece.

  In the right angle of morning sunshine

  the aerial photographer

  shoots from the blue,

  decodes a landscape

  of sheepless uplands

  and ploughed drove roads,

  decodes the airstream, the lapis lazuli

  coat for many compacted skeletons

  seaming the chalk by the sea.

  New crops

  O engines

  flying over the light, barren

  as shuttles, thrown over a huge

  woof

  crossply

  of hedgeless snail tracks,

  you are so high,

  you’ve felled the damp crevices

  you’ve felled the boulder-strewn meadow

  the lichen

  the strong plum tree.

  O engines

  swaying your rubber batons

  on pods, on ripe lupins,

  on a chameleon terrace

  of greenlessness,

  you’re withdrawn from a sea

  of harvests, you’re the foreshore

  of soaked soil leaching

  undrinkable streams.

  Shadows of my mother against a wall

  The wood-pigeon rolls soft notes off its breast

  in a tree which grows by a fence.

  The smell of creosote,

  easy as wild gum

  oozing from tree boles

  keeps me awake. A thunderstorm

  heckles the air.

  I step into a bedroom

  pungent with child’s sleep,

  and lift the potty and pile of picture books

  so my large shadow

  crosses his eyes.

  Sometimes at night, expectant,

  I think I see the shadow of my mother

  bridge a small house of enormous rooms.

  Here are white, palpable walls

  and stories of my grandmother:

  the old hours of tenderness I missed.

  Air layering

  The rain was falling down in slow pulses

  between the horse-chestnuts, as if it would set root there.

  It was a slate-grey May evening

  luminous with new leaves.

  I was at a talk on the appearances of Our Lady

  these past five years at Medjugorje.

  We sat in a small room in the Presbytery:

  the flow of the video scratched, the raindrop

  brimmed its meniscus upon the window

  from slant runnel to sill.

  Later I watched a programme on air layering.

  The round rootball steadied itself

  high as a chaffinch nest, and then deftly

  the gardener severed the new plant.

  She knew its wounded stem would have made roots there.

  The argument

  It was too hot, that was the argument.

  I had to walk a mile with my feet flaming

  from brown sandals and sun.

  Now the draggling shade of the privet made me to dawdle,

  now soft tarmac had to be crossed.

  I was lugging an old school-bag –

  it was so hot the world was agape with it.

  One limp rose fell as I passed.

  An old witch sat in her front garden

  under the spokes of a black umbrella

  lashed to her kitchen chair.

  God was in my feet as I fled past her.

  Everyone I knew was so far away.

  The yellow glob of my ice cream melted and spread.

  I bought it with huge pennies, held up.

  ‘A big one this time!’ the man said,

  so I ate on though it cloyed me.

  It was for fetching the bread

  one endless morning before Bank Holiday.

  I was too young, that was the argument,

  and had to propitiate everyone:

  the man with the stroke, and the burnt lady

  whose bared, magical teeth made me

  smile if I could –

  Oh the cowardice of my childhood!

  The peach house

  The dry glasshouse is almost empty.

  A few pungent geraniums with lost markings

  lean in their pots.

  It is nothing but a cropping place for sun

  on cold Northumbrian July days.

  The little girl, fresh from suburbia,

  cannot believe in the peaches she finds here.

  They are green and furry as monkeys –

  she picks them and drops them.

  All the same they are matched to the word peach

  and must mean more than she sees. She will post them

  unripe in a tiny envelope

  to her eight-year-old class-mates, and write

  carefully in the ruled-up spaces:

  ‘Where we are the place is a palace.’

  A meditation on the glasshouses

  The bald glasshouses stretch here for miles.

  For miles air-vents open like wings.

  This is the land of reflections, of heat

  flagging from. mirror to mirror. Here cloches

  force on the fruit by weeks, while pulses

  of light run down the chain of glasshouses

  and blind the visitors this Good Friday.

  The daffodil pickers are spring-white.

  Their neat heads in a fuzz of sun

  stoop to the buds, make leafless

  bunches of ten for Easter.

  A white thumb touches the peat

  but makes no print. This is the soil-less

  Eden of glasshouses, heat-stunned.

  The haunting of Epworth

  Epworth Rectory was the childhood home of John Wesley. In December 1716 the house was possessed by a poltergeist; after many unsuccessful attempts at exorcism the spirit, nicknamed ‘Old Jeffery’ by the little Wesley girls, left of its own accord.

  Old Jeffery begins his night music.

  The girls, sheathed in their brick skin,

  giggle with terror. The boys are all gone

  out to the world, ‘continually sinning’,

  their graces exotic and paid for.

  Old Jeffery rummages pitchforks

  up the back chimney. The girls

  open the doors to troops of exorcists

  who plod back over the Isle of Axeholme

  balked by the house. The scrimmage

  of iron, shattering windows, and brickwork

  chipped away daily is birdsong

  morning and evening, or sunlight

  into their unsunned lives.

  Old Jeffery tires of the house slowly.

  He knocks the back of the connubial bed

  where nineteen Wesleys, engendered in artlessness

  swarm, little ghosts of themselves.

  The girls learn to whistle his music.

  The house bangs like a side-drum

  as Old Jeffery goes out of it. Daughters

  in white wrappers mount to the windows, sons

  coming from school make notes – the wildness

  goes out towards Epworth and leaves nothing

  but the bald house straining on tiptoe

  after its ghost.

  Preaching at Gwennap

  Gwennap Pit is a natural amphitheatre in Cornwall, where John Wesley preached.

  Preaching at Gwennap, silk

  ribbons unrolling far off,

  the unteachable turquoise and green

  coast dropping far off,

  preaching at Gwennap, where thermals revolve

  to the bare lip, where granite

  breaks its uneasy backbone,

&nbs
p; where a great natural theatre, cut

  to a hairsbreadth, sends back each cadence,

  preaching at Gwennap to a child asleep

  while the wide plain murmurs, and prayers

  ply on the void, tendered like cords

  over the pit’s brim.

  Off to one side

  a horse itches and dreams. Its saddle

  comes open, stitch after stitch,

  while the tired horse, standing for hours

  flicks flies from its arse

  and eats through the transfiguration –

  old sobersides

  mildly eschewing more light.

  On circuit from Heptonstall Chapel

  Tis not everyone could bear these things, but I bless God, my wife is less concerned with suffering them than I in writing them.’

  SAMUEL WESLEY, father of John Wesley, writing of his wife Susanna

  The mare with her short legs heavily mud-caked

  plods, her head down

  over the unearthly grasses,

  the burning salt-marshes,

  through sharp-sided marram and mace

  with the rim of the tide’s eyelid