Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 Read online

  when you’ve finally stripped out the house

  with its iron-cold fireplace,

  its mouldings, its mortgage,

  its single-skin walls

  but you want to write in the plaster

  ‘This is not what I was after,’

  when you’ve got the rainbow-clad baby

  in his state-of-the-art pushchair

  but he arches his back at you

  and pulps his Activity Centre

  and you just want to whisper

  ‘This is not what I was after,’

  when the vacuum seethes and whines in the lounge

  and the waste-disposal unit blows,

  when tenners settle in your account

  like snow hitting a stove,

  when you get a chat from your spouse

  about marriage and personal growth,

  when a wino comes to sleep in your porch

  on your Citizen’s Charter

  and you know a hostel’s opening soon

  but your headache’s closer

  and you really just want to torch

  the bundle of rags and newspaper

  and you’ll say to the newspaper

  ‘This is not what we were after,

  this is not what we were after.’

  FROM

  BESTIARY

  (1997)

  …I was at home

  And should have been most happy, – but I saw

  Too far into the sea, where every maw

  The greater on the less feeds evermore. –

  But I saw too distinct into the core

  Of an eternal fierce destruction,

  And so from happiness I far was gone.

  Still am I sick of it, and tho’, to-day,

  I’ve gather’d young spring-leaves, and flowers gay

  Of periwinkle and wild strawberry,

  Still do I that most fierce destruction see, –

  The Shark at savage prey, – the Hawk at pounce, –

  The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce,

  Ravening a worm…

  JOHN KEATS

  Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds

  Candle poem

  (after Sa‘di Yusuf)

  A candle for the ship’s breakfast

  eaten while moving southward

  through mild grey water

  with the work all done,

  a candle for the house seen from outside,

  the voices and shadows

  of the moment before coming home,

  a candle for the noise of aeroplanes

  going elsewhere, passing over,

  for delayed departures, embarrassed silences

  between people who love one another,

  a candle for sandwiches in service stations

  at four a.m., and the taste of coffee

  from plastic cups, thickened with sugar

  to keep us going,

  a candle for the crowd around a coffin

  and the terrible depth it has to fall

  into the grave dug for everyone,

  the deaths for decades to come,

  our deaths; a candle for going home

  and feeling hungry after saying

  we would never be able to eat the ham,

  the fruit cake, those carefully-buttered buns.

  At the Emporium

  He is the one you can count on

  for yesterday’s bread, rolling tobacco

  and the staccato

  tick of the blinds

  on leathery Wednesday afternoons.

  He has hand-chalked boards with the prices

  of Anchor butter and British wine.

  He doesn’t hold with half-day closing.

  He’s the king of long afternoons

  lounging vested in his doorway.

  He watches the children dwindle

  and dawdle, licking icepops

  that drip on the steps.

  His would be the last face that saw them

  before an abduction. Come in,

  he is always open.

  Next door

  is the same as ours, but different.

  Back to front stairs, and a bass that thuds

  like the music of demolition

  year after year, but the house

  is still standing.

  When we have parties they tense into silence,

  though they are good at fighting.

  After the last screech and slam, their children

  play war on their scab of a lawn.

  We are mirrors of one another,

  never showing what’s real.

  If I turn like this, quickly,

  and look over the fence, what will I see?

  He lived next door all his life

  One year he painted his front door yellow.

  It was the splash of a carrier bag

  in the dun terrace,

  but for the rest he was inconspicuous.

  He went out one way and came back the other,

  often carrying laundry and once compost

  for the tree he thought might do in the back yard.

  Some time later there was its skeleton

  taking up most of the bin.

  He passed the remark ‘It’s a pity’

  when it rained on a Saturday,

  and of a neighbour’s child he said ‘terror’.

  He picked his words like scones from a plate,

  dropping no crumbs. When his front door shut

  he was more gone than last Christmas.

  But for the girls stored in his cellar

  to learn what it meant

  to have no pity, to be terror,

  he was there.

  The surgeon husband

  Here at my worktop, foil-wrapping a silver salmon

  – yes, a whole salmon – I’m thinking

  of the many bodies of women

  that my husband daily opens.

  Here he lunges at me in wellingtons.

  He is up to his armpits, a fisherman

  tugging against the strength of the current.

  I imagine the light for him, clean,

  and a green robing of willow

  and the fish hammering upstream.

  I too tug at the flaps of the salmon

  where its belly was, trying to straighten

  the silver seams before they are sewn.

  We are one in our dreams.

  The epidural is patchy, his assistant’s

  handwriting is slipping. At eleven fifteen

  they barb their patient to sleep, jot ‘knife to skin’,

  and the nurse smiles over her mask at the surgeon.

  But I am quietly dusting out the fish-kettle,

  and I have the salmon clean as a baby

  grinning at me from the table.

  Fishing beyond sunset

  The boy in the boat, the tip of the pole,

  slow swing of the boat as the wash goes round

  from other boats with lights on, heading home

  to islands, from islands: anyway they come.

  Thirty-four bass, small bass, not worth keeping.

  See them in the water, the hang

  of twice-caught fish playing dumb,

  then the shake-off of air. The kickdown

  always surprises you, makes your feet grip

  on the planks of the boat. There is the line

  disappearing into the sunset

  or so it seems, but it is plumbed

  by your finger, which sees nothing

  but a breeze of line running through water.

  Behind you a sheet of fire

  does something to pole, to boat, to boy.

  Hare in the snow

  Hare in the snow cresting

  the run of winter, stretching

  in liquid leaps over the hill,

  then the wind turns, and

  hare stands so still

  he is a freeze of himself, fooling

  the shadows into believi
ng

  he is one of them.

  Need

  (a version from Piers Plowman: ‘The Pardon sent from Truth’)

  I know that no one dare judge another’s need,

  for need is our neighbour, blood to our bone:

  the prisoner in Long Lartin, the poor of shantytown

  bearing children, burdened by bad landlords,

  struggling to scrape together what goes straight out

  on rent, on never enough food for the children

  who cry like crickets from hunger, night-long.

  They slave while they’re sick with hunger,

  wake in the damp of winter, crouch between wall and cradle

  to rock the crying baby, their raw fingers

  chapped with outworking, seaming denim

  for half nothing, pitiful labour paid by the hour

  which takes them nowhere, only to one more

  half-hour’s heat on the meter, scraping and struggling,

  working for nothing.

  The misery of women in run-down hostels

  the misery of the men crammed in with them

  racked by the nothing that is all they have,

  too proud to beg, to show they are slowly starving

  withering away, their poverty hidden like AIDS,

  a shame that must never be shown to their neighbours

  a shame that has made strangers of neighbours

  and hunger the only guest at all their meals.

  The world has kicked into me the future

  of children born into poverty’s welcome

  to parents who have nothing but surplus labour,

  empty hands, thoughts nobody wants.

  Chips are their Sunday roast, dog-ends rolled up in Rizlas

  damp down the parents’ hunger as they look on

  while the kids eat baked beans and bacon.

  By the State’s cold calculation

  they could get by on carrots and bakers’ leavings.

  Only love can help them.

  These will not beg, but there are beggars

  who shoot up everything they’re given

  who have nothing at all wrong with them

  who could perfectly well do a day’s work

  who deserve no pity, no money, nothing.

  Even if they collapse on the streets, coughing

  from the come-back of ancient diseases

  think nothing of it. Don’t be ashamed to walk past

  with your wallet stuffed with credit cards

  as the Bible says.

  But yet. Look again. What about these beggars

  who look perfectly all right, able to do a day’s work,

  ought to be cleared off the streets – all that? And yet

  some of them come from another world, or another time.

  Care in the community is the cold calculation

  that takes care of them. Stop. Look again.

  They live by the phases of the moon

  by an inner fire that will not leave them alone.

  They are penniless as time and tide, wander with nothing

  like the holy apostles, Peter and Paul.

  They have no time for preaching or miracles

  but they can speak in tongues if you listen,

  and catch the wind of truth in the sails

  of what seems like play.

  God who can do anything

  might have made them businessmen,

  but instead he made them his own children

  and sent them out with empty bank accounts

  holey jeans and a blanket to wrap around them.

  These secret disciples break all the rules but his,

  the one rule that tells us to love, and give.

  Think. You will even put up with poets

  for the sake of their patrons, if these are rich men,

  publishers who fancy culture, and keep a newspaper.

  Think of the Lord of heaven who has sent his children

  to be called madmen, and please him

  if you can, by throwing some cash at them.

  And think again. When you are begging

  for God’s pardon, when the daylight after death

  shines on your sins, think of them,

  God’s secret children, born pardoned,

  and what you did for them.

  Sometimes in the rough garden of city spaces

  Sometimes in the rough garden of city spaces

  where I believe a mugger will not approach me

  because so far no mugger has approached me

  I stop to take breath.

  The city exists by acts of faith

  that we and our children are safe,

  that the pounding wheels of cars will miss them,

  that the traffic will stop when the lights turn,

  that parks will stay green, that money is not everything,

  that the lime trees that line our streets are lopped and cropped

  with the best of intentions,

  that the orange glow of the streetlamps is moonlight

  to that couple there, locked in each other, lost

  in the city’s night-time suspension.

  I should like to be buried in a summer forest

  I should like to be buried in a summer forest

  where people go in July,

  only a bus ride from the city,

  I should like them to walk over me

  not noticing anything but sunlight

  and patches of wild strawberries –

  Here! Look under the leaves!

  I should like the child who is slowest

  to end up picking the most,

  and the big kids will show the little

  the only way to grasp a nettle

  and pick it so it doesn’t sting.

  I should like home-time to come

  so late the bus has its lights on

  and a cloud of moths hangs in their beam,

  and when they are all gone

  I should like to be buried in a summer forest

  where the dark steps

  blindfold, on cat foot-pads,

  with the dawn almost touching it.

  The scattering

  First, the echo

  at night, when I said

  ‘I’ll hold you’

  and your voice like a bird’s in the grey morning

  came back ‘Hold you’,

  and your feet in my palm

  were barely hardened by walking,

  and then the scattering,

  the start of grammar

  and distance.

  You say, ‘Hold me.’

  You’ll say, ‘Don’t hold me.’

  All the things you are not yet

  (for Tess)

  Tonight there’s a crowd in my head:

  all the things you are not yet.

  You are words without paper, pages

  sighing in summer forests, gardens

  where builders stub out their rubble

  and plastic oozes its sweat.

  All the things you are, you are not yet.

  Not yet the lonely window in midwinter

  with the whine of tea on an empty stomach,

  not yet the heating you can’t afford and must wait for,

  tamping a coin in on each hour.

  Not the gorgeous shush of restaurant doors

  and their interiors, always so much smaller.

  Not the smell of the newsprint, the blur

  on your fingertips – your fame. Not yet

  the love you will have for Winter Pearmains

  and Chanel No.5 – and then your being unable

  to buy both washing-machine and computer

  when your baby’s due to be born,

  and my voice saying, ‘I’ll get you one’

  and you frowning, frowning

  at walls and surfaces which are not mine –

  all this, not yet. Give me your hand,

  that small one without a mark of w
ork on it,

  the one that’s strange to the washing-up bowl

  and doesn’t know Fairy Liquid from whiskey.

  Not yet the moment of your arrival in taxis

  at daring destinations, or your being alone at stations

  with the skirts of your fashionable clothes flapping

  and no money for the telephone.

  Not yet the moment when I can give you nothing

  so well-folded it fits in an envelope –

  a dull letter you won’t reread.

  Not yet the moment of your assimilation

  in that river flowing westward: river of clothes,

  of dreams, an accent unlike my own

  saying to someone I don’t know: darling…

  Diving girl

  She’s next to nowhere, feeling no cold

  in her white sluther of bubbles.

  She comes to a point like a seal

  in his deep dive, she is sleek.

  As her nostrils close

  she’s at home. See how salt water slides

  as she opens her eyes.

  There is the word naked

  but she’s not spelled by it.

  Look at her skin’s steel glint

  and the knife of her fins.

  With the basking shark

  with the minke whale

  and the grey seal

  she comes up to breathe

  ten miles offshore.

  A pretty shape

  I never stop listening to you sing

  long enough to know what I think.

  All I do is let it go on.

  The bubble of song bounces towards me