Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 Read online

  on the stairs going up, showing respect

  for the small words of the ones leaving,

  the ones who don’t stay for the dancing.

  One sister twists a white candle

  waxed in a nest of hydrangeas –

  brick-red and uncommon, flowers

  she really can’t want – she bruises the limp

  warm petals with crisp fingers

  and then poises her sandal

  over the next non-slip stair

  so the dance streams at her heels

  in the light of a half-shut door.

  On not writing certain poems

  You put your hand over mine and whispered

  ‘There he is, laying against the pebbles’ –

  you wouldn’t point for the shadow

  stirring the trout off his bed

  where he sculled the down-running water,

  and the fish lay there, unbruised

  by the soft knuckling of the river-bed

  or your stare which had found him out.

  Last night I seemed to be walking

  with something in my hand, earthward, down-

  dropping as lead, unburnished –

  a plate perhaps or a salver

  with nothing on it or offered

  but its own shineless composure.

  I have it here on my palm, the weight

  settled, spreading through bone

  until my wrist tips backward, pulled down

  as if my arm was laid in a current

  of eel-dark water – that thrum

  binding the fingers – arrow-like –

  Privacy of rain

  Rain. A plump splash

  on tense, bare skin.

  Rain. All the May leaves

  run upward, shaking.

  Rain. A first touch

  at the nape of the neck.

  Sharp drops kick the dust, white

  downpours shudder

  like curtains, rinsing

  tight hairdos to innocence.

  I love the privacy of rain,

  the way it makes things happen

  on verandahs, under canopies

  or in the shelter of trees

  as a door slams and a girl runs out

  into the black-wet leaves.

  By the brick wall an iris

  sucks up the rain

  like intricate food, its tongue

  sherbetty, furred.

  Rain. All the May leaves

  run upward, shaking.

  On the street bud-silt

  covers the windscreens.

  Dancing man

  That lake lies along the shore

  like a finger down my cheek,

  its waters lull and collapse

  dark as pomegranates,

  the baby crawls on the straw

  in the shadow-map of his father’s chair

  while the priest talks things over

  and light dodges across his hair.

  There’s a lamp lit in the shed

  and a fire on, and a man drinking

  spiritus fortis he’s made for himself.

  But on the floor of the barn

  the dancing man is beginning to dance.

  First a beat from the arch of his foot

  as he stands upright, a neat

  understatement of all that’s in him

  and he lowers his eyes to her

  as if it’s nothing, nothing –

  but she has always wanted him.

  Her baby crawls out from the chairs

  and rolls in his striped vest laughing

  under the feet of the dancers

  so she must dance over him

  toe to his cheek, heel to his hair,

  as she melts to the man dancing.

  They are talking and talking over there –

  the priest sits with his back to her

  for there’s no malice in him

  and her husband glistens like the sun

  through the cypress-flame of the man dancing

  In the shed a blackbird

  has left three eggs which might be kumquats –

  they are so warm. One of them’s stirring –

  who said she had deserted them?

  In the orchard by the barn

  there are three girls wading,

  glossy, laughing at something,

  they spin a bucket between them,

  glowing, they are forgotten –

  something else is about to happen.

  At Cabourg II

  The bathers, where are they? The sea is quite empty,

  lapsed from its task of rinsing the white beach.

  The promenade has a skein of walkers, four to the mile,

  like beads threaded on the long Boulevard in front of the flowers.

  Shutters are all back on the bankers’ fantasy houses,

  but the air inside is glassy as swimming-pool water,

  no one breathes there or silts it with movement,

  Out of the kitchen a take-away steam rises:

  the bankers are having sushi in honour of their guests

  who are here, briefly, to buy ‘an impressionist picture’.

  A boy is buried up to his neck in sand

  but the youth leader stops another who pretends to piss on him.

  The rest draw round, they have got something helpless:

  his head laid back on its platter of curls.

  With six digging, he’s out in a minute.

  They oil his body with Ambre Solaire,

  two boys lay him across their laps, a third

  wipes at his feet then smiles up enchantingly.

  Baron Hardup

  I see the boys at the breakwater

  straighten now, signalling friends,

  and the little imperious one who is just not

  dinted at the back of the arms

  with child-like softness

  sticks up his thumb to mark the next leap.

  This far off it’s peaceful to watch them

  while I’m walking ahead barefoot

  on a wide, grey Norman promenade,

  thinking of the Baron de Charlus

  not in his wheelchair but younger,

  bumbling into seduction in a hot courtyard,

  tipped upside-down like a sand-timer,

  labelled implacably – ‘the invert’

  caught at the wide-striped

  dawn years of the century

  where the candy of skirts blows inward and outward

  to a pure, bellying offshore wind.

  The beautiful line of his coat ripples –

  he’s Baron Hardup with dreams tupping

  like pantomime horses – he fixes his eyeglass

  and glares at the waves with passionate indecisiveness

  as if to stop, or not stop, their irregular fall,

  while the boys figure what he is good for.

  Nearly May Day

  After a night jagged by guard-dogs and nightingales

  I sit to be videoed

  at the corner of this carved balcony

  where ten o’clock sun falls

  past the curve of the Berlin Wall.

  It’s nearly May Day.

  Just here there’s a double wall –

  a skin of concrete, a skin of stone

  the colour of the Alsatians.

  My feet shift on the slats.

  I want to comb my hair straight.

  I have my back

  to a wood in the closed zone –

  an orchard’s bright pelt

  sparkling with blossom tips.

  Bees fly in purposeful zigzags

  over the Wall, tracing their map

  of air and nectar.

  Each day they fly through the spoors

  of air-wiping floodlights now

  sheathed in the watch-towers

  to this one apple tree

  which makes a garden of itself

  under the balcony.

&nb
sp; I have my back to the church.

  Its roof glows in the gaps

  where slate after slate’s peeled off.

  I have my back to the porch

  with its red lining of valerian,

  its sound like a cough

  as the doors squeeze themselves shut.

  Katja unrolls cable

  over the balcony rail.

  A double wiring of roses

  straddles the pews

  in a hamlet which is the other half of here,

  clear and suggestive as a mirror.

  They say nobody lives there

  but guards’ wives and children.

  You rarely see them,

  they melt into the woods like foxes

  but you hear their motorbikes miles off

  clutching the road surface.

  You might hear the guards’ wives say

  ‘Let the kids have the grapes’

  just as the nightingales insist

  for hours when you can’t sleep.

  This hamlet’s like something I’ve dreamed

  in a dream broken by rain,

  with its lilac and dull green

  tenderly shifting leaves,

  its woodpiles,

  its watched inhabitants,

  wives of the guards

  who have between them a little son

  in a too-tight yellow jersey

  flashing along their own balcony.

  He runs from his steep-roofed home

  to scrabble onto his tricycle

  and race with fat frantic legs pedalling

  the few square metres marked by the wives

  with a shield-square of clothes-line

  where they’re forever hanging things out

  while my back’s turned.

  I study the guards’ underpants

  and wish I still smoked

  so I could blow smoke-rings

  from the balcony of Jagdschloss Glienicke

  past the flowering jaws of the apple tree

  over complicated roof-shells

  to the child himself.

  I’d wave, holding the cigarette

  cupped behind my back.

  Any time they choose

  people are changing Deutschmarks

  for a tick on cheap paper,

  a day-trip to the East

  to buy Bulgarian church music

  and butter at half-price,

  to check their faces in a mirror

  and get it all on video.

  to walk through a map of mirrors

  into the other half of here.

  There’s mist on the Glienicke bridge.

  The flags are limp.

  There’s nothing flying at all –

  not a flag, not an aeroplane

  racing down safe corridors.

  It’s nearly May Day.

  A riot’s ripening in Kreuzberg.

  If this is Spring, it’s going on elsewhere

  grasping horse-chestnut buds

  in sticky hands

  warm and forgetful

  as a child who buries himself

  for joy in Pankow’s warm sands.

  [September 1989]

  Three workmen with blue pails

  Three workmen with blue pails

  swerve past an election poster

  wrapped round a lamp-post pillar,

  signed with a single carnation

  and a name for each ward.

  The workmen guffaw –

  it’s five past three on a small street

  which traipses off Unter den Linden

  deep into East Berlin.

  Short, compact and bored

  they tramp over the slats

  where the pavement’s torn up.

  One of them’s telling a joke.

  They swing on under a banner

  for a play by Harold Pinter –

  stretched linen, four metres wide

  and at least two workmen tall,

  spread on a ten-metre wall –

  the play’s The Dumb Waiter.

  They go on past a kindergarten

  which is tipping out children,

  past banks with bullet-holes in them,

  past an industrial shoal

  of tower-block homes

  to the second-right turn

  where the pulse of street-life picks up,

  where there are people and shops.

  Ahead, a queue forms

  as a café rattles itself open

  and starts to serve out ice cream.

  Inside his treacle-brown frame

  a young man flickers and smiles

  as he fans out the biscuit-shells –

  already half the ice cream’s gone

  and the waiter teases the children

  with cold smoke from a new can.

  Seeds stick to their tongues –

  gooseberry, cloudberry – chill,

  grainy and natural.

  Shoving their caps back

  the workmen join on

  and move forward in line

  for what’s over. Tapping light coins

  they move at a diagonal

  to a blue, skew-whiff ditched Trabbi.

  Brown coal

  The room creaked like a pair of lungs

  and the fire wouldn’t go

  till we held up the front page for it.

  All the while the news was on

  that day they wired up the Wall

  while I was swimming on newspaper –

  a cold rustle of words

  to the wheezing of my sister.

  I caught the fringe of her scarf

  in winter smogs after school

  as she towed me through the stutter

  of high-lamped Ford Populars

  and down the mouth of the railway tunnel

  into water-pocked walls

  and the dense sulphurous hollows

  of nowhere in particular.

  It was empty but for smog.

  Coughing through our handkerchiefs

  we walked eerily, lammed

  at the brickwork, picked ourselves up.

  I walked through nowhere last April

  into a mist of brown coal,

  sulphur emissions, diesel

  stopped dead at the Wall,

  the whiff of dun Trabants

  puttering north/south

  past a maze of roadworks,

  leaving hours for us to cross

  in the slow luxury of strolling

  as the streets knit themselves up

  to become a city again.

  By instinct I kept my mouth shut

  and breathed like one of us girls

  in our “identical-twin” coats,

  listening out for rare cars,

  coal at the back of our throats –

  it was England in the fifties,

  half-blind with keeping us warm,

  so I was completely at ease

  in a small street off Unter Den Linden

  as a fire-door behind wheezed

  and Berlin creaked like two lungs.

  Safe period

  Your dry voice from the centre of the bed

  asks ‘Is it safe?’

  and I answer for the days as if I owned them.

  Practised at counting, I rock

  the two halves of the month like a cradle.

  The days slip over their stile

  and expect nothing. They are just days,

  and we’re at it again, thwarting

  souls from the bodies they crave.

  They’d love to get into this room

  under the yellow counterpane

  we’ve torn to make a child’s cuddly,

  they’d love to slide into the sheets

  between soft, much-washed

  flannelette fleece,

  they’d love to be here in the moulded spaces

  between us, where there is no room,

  but we don’t let them. They fly abou
t gustily,

  noisy as our own children.

  Big barbershop man

  Big barbershop man turning away,

  sides of his face

  lathered and shaved

  close with the cut-throat

  he always uses,

  big barbershop man turning away,

  helping the neighbours

  make good, sweating

  inside a stretched t-shirt

  with NO MEANS YES on the back of it,

  waltzing a side of pig,

  taking the weight,

  scalp like a glove

  rucked with the strain,

  big barbershop man turning away

  trim inside like a slice of ham

  big barbershop man

  hoisting the forequarter,

  fat marbled with meat

  stiff as a wardrobe,

  big barbershop man

  waltzing a side of pig

  striped like a piece

  of sun awning, cool

  as a jelly roll,

  big barbershop man waltzing the meat

  like a barber’s pole on yellow Main Street.

  The dry well

  It was not always a dry well.

  Once it had been brimming with water.

  cool, limpid, delicious water,

  but a man came and took water from the well