Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 Read online

  with the present pushing past

  into the pungent smoke of the coffee-shop,

  carrier bags stuffed with cargo

  from Wal-mart and Tesco.

  A tree of heaven, bright yellow

  spreads its leaves above the peardrop

  solvent scent of ASNU VALETING SERVICES.

  She looks where I’m looking

  this woman who asks questions

  and tells me everything I’ve ever done.

  For twenty pounds she’ll give me a golden future

  for ten pounds she’ll give me a silver future

  for a fiver a slam of bronze.

  I believe in the glow of the leaves

  in the shine of car-wax, in Wal-mart

  and in the whiteness of her false teeth.

  She would like to lie, but whatever possesses her

  won’t let her. Here it comes again

  clearing the coffee-smoke, thinning the cargo

  of carrier bags pushing past us,

  until the Saturday men and women

  lose their foothold in time.

  Now they are the dead walking

  at the pace of long-ago film.

  Sleeveless

  There he stands, blind on slivovitz,

  eyes closed, face beatific,

  propped against the side of the coach

  while two girls rub him with snow.

  He goes sleeveless in the snow

  as if he belongs elsewhere

  in a land where blood alone

  is enough to warm him.

  But this isn’t spring. A hyacinth’s

  white whip of root in a jar in November

  won’t stop winter. The sun will go down,

  the wolves will sample the woods

  and snuff his footprints. But the engine’s running.

  Its vibration scrubs him awake

  and those girls are laughing.

  In ten long easy minutes

  he will have left the summit.

  The point of not returning

  is to go back, but never quite back.

  Through all those trees I am unable

  to glimpse the house. Where the new road swings,

  the dark lane made for footsteps remains hidden.

  Where lilac-striped convolvulus

  wound its scent in the dust, new road signs

  describe the route in numeral and symbol.

  There is the hill, but not the right hill.

  There is a blood-red rhododendron

  by a breeze-block wall – but not the right wall,

  and those children in a sunburned straggle

  who face the oncoming traffic (thicker now),

  have bought the wrong sweets at the wrong prices.

  They have too much cash: they are not the right children.

  The form

  Clearing the mirror to see your face

  I’m sure you are there.

  You came into the room behind me

  but when I looked you disappeared.

  Look. I am breathing out mist

  like a horse in winter.

  The glass I almost kissed

  has gone cold. Now, is it you here

  sitting in your usual chair

  under the light, with your Guinness poured

  and the best bit of the newspaper?

  Let’s have a tenner on Papillon, I’m sure

  he’ll do it this time. You show me the form.

  I put out my hand for the winnings

  and take the notes which are warm

  from your touch. But the mirror is cold, sparkling.

  The sentence

  How hushed the sentence is this morning

  like snowfall: words change the landscape

  by hiding what they touch.

  ‘How is he –? Has he –?’

  Bridget takes off her glasses

  and rubs the red pulp of her eyelids.

  The world is a treasure-house of frost

  and sparkling roof-tops. A few doors down

  the sentence works itself out.

  A roller-blader slashes the street like an angel

  with heaven-red cheeks. A fag-end smokes

  in the gutter where a dog noses. Such elation!

  The labour of goodbyes

  goes on quietly behind windows.

  With short, harsh breaths

  With short, harsh breaths

  and lips hitched to each syllable

  you read, but not aloud.

  You rise and go to the stairwell

  as if to call someone. Look up

  at the whitish skylight, the peace

  of another rain-pocked eleven o’clock.

  You are here and you want her

  but she’ll come no more.

  You keep her letters in a box

  and deal them out like patience

  to lie on your breakfast table

  stamps obsolete, envelope eagerly torn

  by the man who once lived in your skin.

  You read the postmark again.

  It’s September, four years after the war.

  Listen. She’s speaking.

  The footfall

  It was you I heard, your tiger pad on the stairs,

  your animal eyes blazing. Now you have my face

  between your paws, tiger. It’s time

  for the first breath. Your playful embrace.

  Suddenly you take away my texture,

  the sheen I’ve had since I was born.

  My hair. You comb it out with your claws

  until the gloss and colour are gone.

  My skin puckers slowly. Your whiskers quiver

  as I keep still between your fore-feet

  while you drink my juices, and for the first time

  rake the lightest glissade down my cheeks.

  Time for you, tiger, to do as you want.

  I heard your footfall and waited in the dark,

  expecting you. When will you come?

  The coffin-makers

  I can’t say why so many coffin-makers

  have come together here. Company, maybe.

  More likely jealousy bites their lips

  when they see another’s golden coffin

  where the corpse will fit like a nut.

  No doubt they swap the lids about

  at dead of night, scratch the silken cheeks of the wood

  so when the mourners come to watch the hammer

  bounce off the nails, they’ll say it’s no good

  and in their white clothes they’ll swarm

  all over the coffin-maker like angry ghosts.

  There’s no need for it to be like this.

  They could lend their tools to one another.

  They could watch each other’s little shrines

  in case the candle goes out. Instead they blow it out

  and sourly scour the insides of another cheap

  deal coffin for the common man.

  How many golden coffins can anyone want?

  Of those who appear at the alley-end,

  they prefer the advance buyers. It takes know-how

  to select a coffin for yourself.

  ‘In our family it’s cancer. Allow for shrinkage.’

  ‘Dropsy does us. Add it on to the width.’

  Can a man know the shape of the wood

  that will encase him? Can a woman

  close her eyes and breathe in the scent of cedar?

  These are the ones the coffin-makers like

  to sit with by the spirit-lamp. For these they bring out

  tea-plums, infuse Silver Needle

  and drink before they do the measuring.

  Time to compare wood-shavings,

  rubbing their curls between the fingers. Meanwhile

  man and wife from the flat upstairs

  take their blue bird for a walk

  to the evening park, still in its cage.

  Inside out

  Snug as
a devil’s toenail embedded

  in blue liass, plastic

  in your movements as in dreams, you kick

  for headiness at the rich

  red walls that close on you like elastic.

  But now they’ve shucked you out, bare-naked

  in the devil’s kitchen, toes curled

  flinching from chip scraps, ash,

  lino sticky with beer tack,

  the nail-on-nylon scrape of the cold world.

  You are born, wed, dead, buried.

  The wooden walls of your coffin

  grip like hands, reassuring. You bang them

  for joy that they’ll bang back, booming

  that you’re hidden, hidden, hidden within.

  The blessing

  The halls are thronged, the grand staircase murmurous.

  There’s a smell of close-packed bodies, lilac,

  hair-gel and sweat. Handprints on the brass railings

  fade like breath on a cold window.

  Outside the city is stunned with snow.

  There he is, just where he should be

  by that leather-topped, deeply-scored table

  where fortunes are lost and made. He explains,

  and those at the back lean closer

  to catch the ripple of laughter.

  A joke, and the group dissolves

  to stare, study, and point a finger.

  He waits for them to catch up with him.

  You need a guide, with so many rooms

  and between them, so many turnings.

  I am there too, but not speaking.

  I wait while the paint peels,

  alone with the pulse of a Matisse

  and the sunlight beating full on us.

  But perhaps I say this

  as I see him hasten down another staircase:

  ‘You always had a blessing with you,

  and you still have a blessing with you.

  Keep moving. Go as fast as you can

  and whatever I say, don’t listen.’

  FROM

  SECRETS

  (1994)

  Lemon sole

  I lay and heard voices

  spin through the house

  and there were five minutes to run

  for the snow-slewed school bus.

  My mother said they had caught it

  as she wiped stars from the window –

  the frost mended its web

  and she put her snow-cool hand to my forehead.

  The baby peeked round her skirts

  trying to make me laugh

  but I said my head hurt

  and shut my eyes on her and coughed.

  My mother kneeled

  until her shape hid the whole world.

  She buffed up my pillows as she held me.

  ‘Could you eat a lemon sole?’ she asked me.

  It was her favourite

  she would buy it as a treat for us.

  I only liked the sound of it

  slim, holy and expensive

  but I said ‘Yes, I will eat it’

  and I shut my eyes and sailed out

  on the noise of sunlight, white sheets

  and lemon sole softly being cut up.

  Christmas caves

  A draught like a bony finger

  felt under the door

  but my father swung the coal scuttle

  till the red cave of the fire roared

  and the pine-spiced Christmas tree

  shook out plumage of glass and tinsel.

  The radio was on but ignored,

  greeting ‘Children all around the world’

  and our Co-op Christmas turkey

  had gone astray in the postal system –

  the headless, green-gibletted corpse

  revolved in the sorting-room

  its leftover flesh

  never to be eaten.

  Tomorrow’s potatoes rolled to the boil

  and a chorister sang like a star

  glowing by the lonely moon –

  but he was not so far,

  though it sounded like Bethlehem

  and I was alone in the room

  with the gold-netted sherry bottle

  and wet black walnuts in a jar.

  That violet-haired lady

  That violet-haired lady, dowager-

  humped, giving herself so many

  smiles, taut glittering smiles,

  smiles that swallow the air in front of her,

  smiles that cling to shop-mirrors

  and mar their silvering, smiles

  like a spider’s wrinklework

  flagged over wasteland bushes –

  she’s had so many nips and tucks,

  so much mouse-delicate

  invisible mending. Her youth

  squeaks out of its prison –

  the dark red bar of her mouth

  opening and closing.

  She wants her hair to look black,

  pure black, so she strands it with violet,

  copperleaf, burgundy, rust –

  that violet-haired lady, dowager-

  humped, giving herself

  so many smiles, keeping the light on.

  Whooper swans

  They fly

  straight-necked and barely white

  above the bruised stitching of clouds

  above wind and the sound of storms

  above the creak of the tundra

  the howl of weather

  the scatter

  and wolfish gloom

  of sleet icing their wings,

  they come

  on their strong-sheathed wings

  looking at nothing

  straight down a freezing current of light,

  they might

  astonish a sleepy pilot

  tunnelling his route above the Arctic,

  his instruments darken and wink

  circling the swans

  and through his dull high window at sunrise

  he sees them

  ski their freezing current of light

  at twenty-seven thousand feet

  past grey-barrelled engines

  spitting out heat

  across the flight of the swans,

  and they’re gone

  the polar current sleeking them down

  as soon as he sees them.

  Snow Queen

  Long long I have looked for you,

  snowshoeing across the world

  across the wild white world

  with my heart in my pocket

  and my black-greased boots

  to keep the cold out,

  past cathedrals and pike marshes

  I’ve tracked you,

  so long I have looked for you.

  In your star-blue palace

  I wandered and could not find you

  in your winter garden

  I picked icicles,

  my fingers burned on your gate

  of freezing iron

  I have the pain

  of it yet on my palm,

  through clanging branches

  and black frost-fall

  I dared not call

  so I slide above worlds of ice

  where the fishes kiss

  and the drowned farmer

  whips on his cart

  through bubbles of glass

  and his dogs prance

  at the tail-end, frozen

  with one leg cocked

  and their yellow urine

  twined in thickets of ice.

  I stamp my boot

  and the ice booms.

  I have looked so long

  I am wild and white

  as your creatures, I might

  be one of your own.

  The cuckoo game

  It starts with breaking into the wood

  through a wave of chestnut leaves.

  I am grey as a spring morning

  fat and fuzzy as pussy willow,

  all around I feel them
simmering

  those nests I’ve laid in,

  like burst buds, a hurt place

  lined for the young who’ve gone

  unfledged to the ground.

  There they splay, half-eaten

  and their parents see nothing

  but the one that stays.

  This is the weather that cuckoos love:

  the breaking of buds,

  I am grey in the woods, burgling

  the body-heat of birds,

  riding the surf of chestnut flowers

  on spread feathers.

  I love the kiss of a carefully-built nest

  in my second of pausing –

  this is the way we grow

  we cuckoos,

  if you think cuckoos never come back

  we do. We do.

  The butcher’s daughter

  Where have you been, my little daughter

  out in the wild weather?

  I have met with a sailor, mother,

  he has given me five clubs for juggling

  and says I must go with him for ever.

  Oh no, my treasure

  you must come in and stay for ever