Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 Read online

  over the wet surfaces of the kitchen

  and you with your arms folded

  in that tiny immemorial way you’ve observed,

  your soft, small arms folded

  over your chest where your breath

  flows and unflows easily,

  don’t need to look at me.

  The bubble of your song bounces towards me

  its surface tension strong

  as it shudders, recovers.

  You let the song go where it wants.

  When you’ve fallen asleep, or I think you’ve fallen

  I withdraw, still singing

  or perhaps still listening to you sing,

  but you feel me going. Why am I going

  always going, instead of listening to you sing?

  Your hand knows better than mine

  and with authority

  of touch I cannot match

  wraps me round you again.

  Viking cat in the dark

  Viking cat in the dark

  is paw-licked velvet, sinew of shadow,

  a thread of smoke bitterly burning,

  a quiver of black like a riddle.

  The huts lie low

  a hoard half-hidden

  a clutch of eggs

  in the dune’s hollow

  and horned helmets

  are nightmares to wake from

  shapes cut from dreams

  – but the cat leaps.

  Like rain falling faster

  the shadows whisper

  and rain spatters

  like death’s downpour:

  ‘Fight for me, dawn-slayer,

  wake with me, sleep-sower,

  keeper of dreams,

  the dream we came for.’

  There is no noise.

  Only the quick

  paws of the cat in the dark

  like feet on the stairs,

  but the cold grey hands of the sea clap

  on the beached long-ships,

  and a shape pours itself flat

  to the chink of sword music.

  Viking cat in the dark

  is paw-licked velvet, sinew of shadow.

  A thread of smoke, bitterly burning

  quivers her body like a riddle.

  Baby sleep

  ’s

  not like any other

  day sleep night sleep

  long drive sleep

  too cold too hot sleep

  What’s that window doing shut? sleep

  get a bit of peace sleep

  hungry thirsty

  need to pee

  sleep,

  baby sleep’s

  all over the shop sleep

  new nappy and babygro poppers

  done up to the neck sleep

  fat fingers

  starfishing

  damp feathers

  on neck curling

  baby lotion and talc sleep

  sleep in Mum and Dad’s bed sleep

  cry in sleep and then sleep sleep

  sleep while the big peop

  le wash and dress sleep

  baby sleep

  Frostbite

  When you grow tired of the flame

  wumping to life in the central heating boiler,

  and the duvet sweats like obstinate flesh

  in the middle of winter,

  don’t finger the lightswitch. Leave the coil

  of electricity sleeping. Go down

  tread after tread by the draught

  of heat coming upward. The voice

  of the house is warning. Get out

  it breathes, Leave us alone

  to our shuffling of dust-mites, our sorting

  of smell and shadow into home.

  First the bolt, then the chain, then the Chubb.

  You’re outside, but even in a nightdress

  that comes to the thighs, you can’t rub the warmth off.

  Basketball player on Pentecost Monday

  With his hands he teaches wind to move –

  not this shuffle of leaves

  from rows of pollarded trees

  but the salt-laden, incoming

  breath of the Indies.

  He’s six foot seven,

  liquid in dull grey track suit,

  his trainers undone.

  There’s a small keen boy

  at his heels, yapping

  for ball-time, air-time.

  It’s playtime in the gardens

  with children sagely going round

  on patient horses they strike with small

  privileged hands.

  Behind him, gravelly sand,

  a guitarist picking

  the bones of a tune

  mournful as Sunday,

  the empty horses

  of carousels turning.

  Tell the basketball player how tight

  time is, how he’s reached perfection

  at the same time as the man with his rake

  puts the gravel straight on something.

  Tell him this is the moment

  the arrow of his life flew out of

  to return into his breastbone.

  Or say nothing.

  Tiger lookout

  Refrigerator days.

  Ours is the size of a walk-in larder,

  casing everything.

  One word

  which has gone out of fashion

  is putrefaction.

  When Simmonds fell from his tiger lookout

  it was not the growl

  nor the stripes

  that said tiger.

  It was the tiger’s breath.

  All that old, bad meat

  furring its teeth.

  For a moment Simmonds was critical,

  sniffing the exhalation of corpses,

  the walk-in larder where he was going.

  Tiger Moth caterpillar

  Two spines curve in

  as the sisters face on a gate

  in their matching cardigans.

  They are looking into something –

  a stolen Swan Vesta box

  plump with green privet,

  and there’s one match left

  with which to poke it –

  their marvellous possession.

  Inner thighs chafe on a crust of lichen.

  Riding the gate is the best game

  these two have ever come on.

  The more bloody a ballad

  they more they love it. Cigars,

  betrayal, the flames of hell

  and the slaughter of innocence

  are what speaks, makes the gate creak.

  Girls, give us a song

  in your tidy cardigans. Your hair’s

  deceptively sleek, you are

  tangled, complicit, in on it.

  Hungry Thames

  Hungry Thames, I walk over the bridge

  half-scared you’ll whittle me down

  where the brown water is eager

  and tipped with foam.

  You sigh and suck. You lick at the steps

  you would like to come up.

  Hungry Thames, we feed you on concrete,

  orange-peel, polystyrene cups,

  we hold our kids by a handful of clothing

  to let them look at your dimples,

  your smiling waters. We should hold them tighter,

  these are whirlpools, this is hunger

  lashing its tail in the mud, deep down

  where the river gets what it wants.

  The wasp

  Now winter comes and I am half-asleep

  crawling the hollow of an apple, my sound

  a battery toy in a child’s cupped hand,

  or I climb to a ledge and lie, dulled

  by its half-warmth. Half-wasp, I’m still

  helpless not to sting your exploring finger

  helpless in the pulse of my body.

  The paddle of your hand churns

  as you find something to kill me.


  I keep on stinging. I cannot learn

  through my crispness, the coat of warning

  that says what I am.

  Little Ellie and the timeshare salesman

  The man who gave little Ellie his forever

  love was a timeshare salesman.

  He let her look round the place

  when the carpet was freshly steam-cleaned

  and the teabag box was full to the brim,

  but he left little Ellie for an instant

  and she spied the used teabag jam-jar

  sodden and rusty as iron.

  Oh Ellie, whispered little Ellie,

  there have been many here before you.

  But she was smiling at the door

  when he gave her his hand, wet from the ballcock

  he’d quickly fixed in the cistern.

  In a serenade of gurgles and yawns

  the plumbing talked itself down

  and perfect Ellie was his dream.

  How could he replace or kill her

  with her genius for noticing nothing

  but the nice day, the short walk to the pool

  the view of the beach from the bathroom window?

  Sweet Ellie never crossed the time-share salesman,

  but tended her one week like a garden.

  She did not keep a diary where the others

  might be noted or brooded over.

  Kindly she watches him run on the wheel

  of his weeks till he gets back to nineteen

  where she is always happy to wait for him.

  Dusty geraniums come back to life

  in the days where Ellie waters them,

  and the time-share salesman slackens his smiles

  at the sight of Ellie’s daring paëlla:

  in week nineteen she is his forever.

  Bouncing boy

  (for Paul)

  All the squares of trampoline are taken

  by children leaping like chessmen

  who won’t play the game. Up, flying.

  from tiny freeholds, hitting the sky’s

  elastic surprise, then down.

  There’s a space for you always.

  Two kids eating ice-cream

  with careful darts of the tongue

  watch as you start to climb

  the icy November sky, hand over hand.

  You hear the clap of the sea

  and your bright blue trampoline applauding

  with the dull fervour of rubber

  each time you go down,

  and the kids eating ice-cream

  with wind in their teeth say nothing

  as the time mounts and your turn

  grows impossibly long.

  Ghost at noon

  On the white path at noon when the sun

  burns through olive and eucalyptus

  and the pale stones rattle

  as if someone’s walking,

  when the goat jumps and the sea shivers

  like a dog turning its belly upward

  to a hand that teases it,

  and the sky is cloudless but suddenly

  dark drops spatter the dust

  and there, where no one is walking,

  a line of wet footprints.

  Crickets crackle in the dry maquis,

  their sound unbroken.

  No one is walking.

  If you touch your finger to the dust, quickly,

  you’ll catch the pressure just gone.

  Greek beads

  Small, silvery, slipping

  from finger to finger,

  beads for street corners,

  beads for white noon

  when shadows curl by the walls

  and the dog in the square lolls

  with his tongue unfurled,

  beads for navy-blue evenings

  when the smell of oranges

  drifts to the fountain,

  beads for waiting on the landing-stage,

  for the heat that shimmers

  from village to village,

  for the boy guarding the goats

  and the old woman hoeing in black,

  beads for leaving to find work

  and for the dream of coming back,

  beads for remembering

  and for forgetting,

  wrapped round the wrists of babies

  and the dying,

  beads for the life we live in,

  small, silvery, slipping

  from finger to finger.

  Tea at Brandt’s

  Music plays gently. Yesterday’s morning paper

  flutters at the end of its long emigration

  from being news. This is the present,

  but when? Coconut cake, a stained napkin,

  a tea-glass bisected by long spoon.

  Any minute now it’s going to rain.

  What kind of animal is the past?

  A wooden screen makes two rooms of one.

  On the other side, where I saw her last,

  my baby girl. I’ll wipe her nose with the napkin,

  take her to the Ladies and change her,

  blow the bubble of words towards her

  that says, This is the present, there is no other.

  We are men, not beasts

  We are men, not beasts

  though we fall in the dark

  on the rattlesnake’s path

  and flinch with fire of fear

  running over our flesh

  and beat it to death,

  we are men, not beasts

  and we walk upright

  with the moss-feathered dark

  like a shawl on our shoulders

  and we carry fire

  steeply, inside a cage of fingers,

  we are men, not beasts,

  and what we cannot help wanting

  we banish – the barn yawn, the cow breath,

  the stickiness we come from.

  Index of titles and first lines

  (Titles are shown in italics, first lines in roman type.)

  A candle for the ship’s breakfast, 225

  A cow here in the June meadow, 63

  A cow here in the June meadow, 63

  Adders, 204

  A draught like a bony finger, 51

  A dream of wool, 138

  A fat young man in BERBER’S ICE CREAM PARLOUR, 184

  After a night jagged by guard-dogs and nightingales, 168

  After midday the great lazy, 102

  Ahvenanmaa, 196

  Air layering, 141

  All the squares of trampoline are taken, 246

  All the things you are not yet, 235

  A lorry-load of stuff, 18

  A meditation of the glasshouses, 143

  A mortgage on a pear tree, 131

  An Irish miner in Staffordshire, 156

  A pæony truss on Sussex place, 132

  A pear tree stands in its own maze, 131

  Approaches to winter, 75

  A pretty shape, 237

  A safe light, 85

  As good as it gets, 37

  A skater comes to this blue pond, 119

  At Cabourg, 135

  At Cabourg II, 166

  At Great Neck one Easter, 64

  At the Emporium, 226

  At three in the morning, 96

  Babes in the Wood, 216

  Baby sleep, 239

  Baron Hardup, 167

  Basketball player on Pentecost Monday, 241

  Bathing at Balnacarry, 213

  Because she told a lie, he says, 35

  Beetroot Soup, 211

  Big barbershop man, 175

  Big barbershop man turning away, 175

  Bouncing boy, 246

  Boys on the Top Board, 214

  Breakfast, 94

  Breast to breast against the azaleas, 196

  Breeze of ghosts, 60

  Bristol Docks, 32

  Brown coal, 172

  By chance I was alone in my bed the morning, 191

  Cajun, 217


  Candle poem, 225

  Candlemas, 154

  Christmas caves, 51

  Christmas roses, 97

  Clearing the mirror to see your face, 42

  Code-breaking in the Garden of Eden, 126

  Coiled peel goes soft on the deserted table, 88

  Cold pinches the hills around Florence, 122

  Cool as sleep, the crates ring, 74

  Cursing softly and letting the matches drop, 112

  Cyclamen, blood-red, 21

  Cyclamen, blood-red, fly into winter, 21

  Dancing man, 164

  Decoding a night’s dreams, 138

  Deep in busy lizzies and black iron, 199

  Dense slabs of braided-up lupins, 148

  Depot, 17

  Diving girl, 236

  Do they wake careless and warm, 158

  Domestic poem, 71

  Drink and the Devil, 195

  Dropped yolks of shore-lamp quiver on tarmac, 180

  Dublin 1971, 151

  Father, 216

  First, the echo, 234

  First, the retreat of bees, 20

  Fishing beyond sunset, 229

  Florence in permafrost, 122

  For all frozen things, 133

  For three years I’ve been wary of deep water, 103

  Fortune-teller on Church Road, 40

  Frostbite, 240

  ‘Fuck this staring paper and table, 81

  Getting the Strap, 203

  Ghost at noon, 247