Glad of These Times Read online

  Blackberries after Michaelmas

  These blackberries belong to the devil.

  Don’t try to eat them now

  or drop them in your pail.

  Their flaccid sweetness

  belongs to the one who ruined Adam,

  set him to work in these hard fields

  set him wallowing in green water

  for pilchard and mackerel.

  These blackberries are the devil’s

  and have his spit on them –

  look where it settles.

  To my nine-year-old self

  You must forgive me. Don’t look so surprised,

  perplexed, and eager to be gone,

  balancing on your hands or on the tightrope.

  You would rather run than walk, rather climb than run

  rather leap from a height than anything.

  I have spoiled this body we once shared.

  Look at the scars, and watch the way I move,

  careful of a bad back or a bruised foot.

  Do you remember how, three minutes after waking

  we’d jump straight out of the ground floor window

  into the summer morning?

  That dream we had, no doubt it’s as fresh in your mind

  as the white paper to write it on.

  We made a start, but something else came up –

  a baby vole, or a bag of sherbet lemons –

  and besides, that summer of ambition

  created an ice-lolly factory, a wasp trap

  and a den by the cesspit.

  I’d like to say that we could be friends

  but the truth is we have nothing in common

  beyond a few shared years. I won’t keep you then.

  Time to pick rosehips for tuppence a pound,

  time to hide down scared lanes

  from men in cars after girl-children.

  or to lunge out over the water

  on a rope that swings from that tree

  long buried in housing –

  but no, I shan’t cloud your morning. God knows

  I have fears enough for us both –

  I leave you in an ecstasy of concentration

  slowly peeling a ripe scab from your knee

  to taste it on your tongue.

  Fallen angel

  Waist-deep in snow and wading

  through the world’s cold,

  this fallen angel with wings furled

  on his way home from Bethlehem,

  the story all told.

  Centuries after the birth

  through drab years with the promise fading

  like gilt off the gold,

  fallen angel still tramping the earth –

  so long, the way back to Bethlehem

  through the world’s cold.

  Bridal

  Bride in the mud of the yard,

  bare feet skilled to find

  the nub of hard ground.

  She stands as if she were transparent,

  ears spiked, fingers encircled,

  skirts stitched with metal.

  Mud squelches through the keyhole

  between first and second toe,

  she slips, rescues herself.

  Silence of banknotes

  from sweaty hands, pinned to her dress

  so the president’s face shows.

  She drives the cows in

  through velvet of shit and slime,

  their soiled tails switching

  their dirty udders craving release

  as women crave the gums of their babies

  in the first shudder of feeding.

  In the silence of the marriage night

  with a befuddled bridegroom

  too old for the task at hand

  she will not cry out.

  Bride in the mud of the yard,

  thirteen and hopping

  through velvet of cowshit

  from stone to stone.

  Still life with ironing

  I love it when you look at me like this,

  and the washed smell of your blue denim

  We are washed out, the two of us,

  shadows of what we have been.

  A moth in the bowl of a paper lampshade,

  a gust of night and a baby’s cry,

  a drop of milk on the wrist, inside

  where the blood beats time.

  Sometimes a heatwave is too much to take.

  We are not up to it, up for it,

  bare enough, blank enough. We fake

  pleasure but turn towards evening,

  to the clink of a glass, the settling of blackbirds

  the talkative hose in the next garden,

  a shirt with the buttons undone

  and shadows put in by the iron.

  Spanish Irish

  It is your impulse I remember,

  the movement that made you your own,

  the way you laughed when you were told

  some daily but delightful thing,

  and the way you could not be fooled.

  When I saw that man who recalled you

  I put out my hand to keep him

  as if his Spanish Irish face

  must lighten in recognition,

  and I was on the point of speaking

  the pleasure of your name.

  Cowboys

  They rode the ridge those five minutes

  I was caught in traffic

  watching nothing but rain

  falling on slate,

  they rode the beauty of angles,

  they laddered oblivion

  and saved their own lives eight times

  as their boots spun,

  they rode without harness

  astride the ridge of the roof,

  they chucked a rope around the chimney

  before it galloped off,

  they rode in a rain-sweat,

  they might have fallen like snow,

  they hollered across the prairie

  until the roofs echoed.

  Below Hungerford Bridge

  Below Hungerford Bridge the river

  oils its own surface like a seabird.

  Tide fights with current, crowds

  surge to a concert, the light thickens.

  How unaccountable the dead are:

  I think you rear from your photograph

  with an expression of terror: I can’t move.

  Will you let me out of here?

  I think I see T.S. Eliot

  wan in his green make-up

  but slyly playful, a big cat

  gone shabby with keeping.

  The traffic halts. There’s nothing

  but a few pile-driven wharves

  and the river remembering

  its old courses.

  Ophelia

  I dreamed my love became a boat

  on the saltings in winter

  after long treading the green water,

  I dreamed my love flew to the bar

  where the tide teemed with the river,

  and bucked and fought there,

  I dreamed that my love’s timber

  was a bed for eelgrass

  and marsh samphire,

  I dreamed my love became a boat

  on the saltings in winter

  after long treading the green water,

  and beneath his shroud of skin

  was a rib chamber

  for winds to whistle in.

  Winter bonfire

  My mind aches where I cannot touch it.

  It has put a net over some words,

  it is hiding a poem.

  Who is that man tending flames in his garden,

  and why does he heap armfuls of paper

  on his winter bonfire?

  If I write down anything

  no matter how stealthily

  the poem will know it.

  One A.M.

  Melancholy at one A.M. –

  the poem ended

  or else just quietly
>
  lying under the table

  gnawing the bone of its being –

  the lighthouse in its bowl of sea

  the town by its holy well

  and the owls hunting.

  Surf hollows the base of the cliffs,

  owls hollow the safety of night

  and the poem makes its rest

  by turning and turning

  like a hare in its form.

  Lemon and stars

  The stars come so close

  they seem not to be shining

  but to be remaking the world

  in their own pattern

  and we seem to be caught in their dust

  like the fingerprints of creatures

  not yet imagined.

  Besides, there is the starlight

  not enough to make star-shadow

  but enough, in the absence of moon

  to heap up darkness

  just here, under the lemon tree.

  Cutting open the lemons

  After all they didn’t taste of salt

  or the winter storms.

  I had not expected the insides to be so

  offhandedly daffodil –

  lemons should be more malleable

  to the imagination –

  but like babies they are sure

  that the planting and tending

  gives no right over them.

  Hearing owls

  The dark fabric of night not torn

  but seamed with the flight of owls

  hunting the margin of the Downs.

  The houses pull their roofs over them,

  the sleepers plunge beneath their bedclothes

  at the onrush of wings,

  the mouse runs with its trail of urine.

  The owl pulls off a miracle

  as it homes in

  like a jump-jet in mid-Atlantic

  sighting its landing area

  in a waste of sea slop.

  The mouse is done. The owl swallows

  while a car passes, knowing nothing

  of the owl agape at its own fortune.

  ‘Often they go just before dawn’

  A wash of stars covers the sky

  before the day comes,

  before the slippery quickness of brush-strokes

  dries to a surface,

  a wash of stars covers the sky

  announcing with pallor

  that they are going out

  or that something else –

  call it a day, or dawn –

  is about to come in.

  Quick, quick, get up the ladder

  and paint in more brightness

  for the stars to be dark against.

  May voyage

  A May evening and a bright moon

  riding easily in its mystery,

  you come out onto the balcony

  and gaze there, relaxed, intent

  as the horizon softens towards France

  and the moon voyages, voyages.

  What storms have you seen!

  Such a hurricane

  when wind hurled around the building

  like an express train,

  but you fought it out of your home

  and now you note the turning of the tide

  as the moon voyages, voyages

  from peace into deeper peace

  from old age into youth,

  behind you the French windows are open

  ahead of you only the shining

  sea and the lovely work of the moon

  as it voyages, voyages

  into the calm.

  About the Author

  Helen Dunmore is a poet, novelist, short story and children’s writer. Her poetry books have been given the Poetry Book Society Choice and Recommendations, Cardiff International Poetry Prize, Alice Hunt Bartlett Award and Signal Poetry Award, and Bestiary was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

  Her poem ‘The Malarkey’ won first prize in the National Poetry Competition in 2010. Her latest Bloodaxe poetry titles are Out of the Blue: Poems 1975–2001 (2001), Glad of These Times (2007), and The Malarkey (2012).

  She has published eleven novels and three books of short stories with Penguin, including A Spell of Winter (1995), winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, Talking to the Dead (1996), The Siege (2001), Mourning Ruby (2003), House of Orphans (2006) and The Betrayal (2010), as well as a ghost story, The Greatcoat (2012), with Hammer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

  Copyright

  Copyright © Helen Dunmore 2007

  First published 2007 by

  Bloodaxe Books Ltd,

  Eastburn,

  South Park,

  Hexham,

  Northumberland NE46 1BS.

  This ebook edition first published in 2015.

  www.bloodaxebooks.com

  For further information about Bloodaxe titles

  please visit our website or write to

  the above address for a catalogue.

  Cover design: Neil Astley & Pamela Robertson-Pearce.

  The right of Helen Dunmore to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN: 978 1 78037 010 1 ebook