The Malarkey Read online

  until I was swallowed

  in the dark of the turning staircase.

  Lethe

  Is it Lethe or is it dock water?

  Either has the power.

  The neighbourhood killer

  is somewhere quietly washing up

  dipping and dipping his fork

  in the dirty water.

  The police vans sit crooning

  on the crux of the Downs.

  How quickly the young girls walk

  from work and from the shops.

  The frost that was bone cold

  has eased into rain, the dock water

  takes everything and turns it brown.

  The Queue’s Essentially

  The queue’s essentially

  docile surges get us

  very slowly somewhere.

  Like campfire, life springs up –

  that pair ahead of me

  (newly landed on Easyjet, he

  shunts the wheeled, packed

  tartan suitcase

  inch by inch

  through jumpy fractures of brake-light

  on wet pavement) –

  that pair ahead of me

  who graze on their vegetable pasty

  and pass it in Polish

  from his hand to hers –

  so intimate, rained-upon –

  learning so quickly it will be a mistake

  to take that taxi

  all the way to Kilburn –

  The Captainess of Laundry

  I am the captainess of laundry

  and I sing to its brave tune,

  to the crack and the whip and the flap of the sheets

  and the rack going up, going down, going down

  and the rack going up and going down,

  I am the captainess of laundry

  and I salt my speech with a song

  of the bleach and the blue and the colours holding true

  and the glaze of the starch on my skin, my skin,

  and the glaze of starch on my skin,

  I am the captainess of laundry

  and I swing my basket through the town

  with the sheets and the shirts and the white petticoats

  and a snowy-breasted cover tied around, tied around

  and a snowy-breasted cover tied around.

  The Day’s Umbrellas

  On the same posts each evening

  the harbour cormorants

  hang out their wings to dry

  like the day’s umbrellas

  as the late ferry passes.

  In sour-sweet ramparts of ivy

  the blackbirds call

  drowsily, piercingly.

  Above them the gulls

  are casing the terraces.

  Thickly, the pigeons

  groom their own voices

  as parents in the half-light

  tiptoe away from babies

  over their heads in sleep.

  The Deciphering

  How busy we are with the dead in their infancy,

  who are still damp with the sweat of their passing,

  whose hair falls back to reveal a scar.

  We think of wiping their skin, attending them

  in the old way, but are timid, ignorant.

  We walk from the high table where they are laid

  leaving their flesh royally mounded

  just as they have left it

  for the undertakers to cherish.

  We consider the last kiss,

  the taste and the grain of it.

  The lift doors squeeze open, then shut.

  All day we think that we have lost our car keys.

  There is a feeling in the back of the mind

  as we eat a meal out on the balcony

  but the door refuses to open

  and although my sisters have prepared food elaborately

  you do not advance to us, smiling.

  The children have put sauce on the side of their plates

  thinking you will come and swipe a chip,

  thinking this meal is one you cooked

  as always, humming to yourself in the kitchen,

  breaking off to tap the barometer

  and watch starlings roost on the pier.

  How long it takes to stop being busy with that day,

  each second of it like the shard

  of a pot which someone has laboured to dig up

  and piece together without knowledge

  of language or context.

  Slow, slow, the deciphering.

  The Tarn

  Still as the water is

  the wind draws on it in iron

  this is the purple country, the border

  where we threw ourselves down

  onto the heather.

  Even the lapwing knows how to pretend.

  She runs with her broken wing

  to hide the fact of her young.

  A cold small rain spatters the tarn

  the wind writes on the dark water.

  The Gift

  You never wanted the taste

  of the future on your tongue.

  How often, hurriedly, I saw you

  swallow a premonition.

  If the gift comes, you told me,

  do not let it in.

  Obedient, I wrote poems

  but the gift still came

  though the doors were bolted.

  I’m here, it told me

  to make you know things

  but not their names.

  What Will You Say

  (after Baudelaire)

  What will you say, my soul, poor and alone,

  and my heart with its heart sucked out,

  What will you say tonight to the one

  (if she’s really the one this time)?

  totheverybeautifultotheverygoodtotheverydear

  Ah no. Speak clearly. What will you say

  to her, so good, so fair, so dear

  whose heavenly gaze has made your desert flower?

  You’ll say you’ve had enough. No more.

  You’ve no pride left but what goes to praise her.

  No strength left but in her douce power,

  no senses but what she gives.

  Sweet authority! Douce power!

  or do you mean you’re shit-scared

  to go anywhere without her?

  Is she your mother?

  Her look clothes us in light.

  Her ghost is the scent of a rose.

  Let her ghost dance with the air

  let its torch blaze through the streets –

  You’d like that, no doubt.

  When you’ve given up running after her

  her ghost will issue commands

  to do what you’ve already done.

  It’s over with you. If she won’t feed you

  you must stay hungry. She is your guardian

  angel, your bodyguard, no one

  comes close, you can’t love anyone.

  Cloud

  Nature came to us abhorring sharp edges

  raw sunlight and the absence of cloud:

  it is November deep in the mist

  and by a gate a man stands lost in thought –

  how that farm hunkers ruddily in a crease of land

  and the dog yaps into the twilight –

  We used to say we were walking in the cloud

  do you remember? – and we were born there

  natives of chrysanthemums, bonfire afternoons,

  makers of the finest shades of meaning.

  Low over the hill the cloud hangs.

  Mist fills the serrations of plough.

  I Have Been Thinking of You So Loudly

  I have been thinking of you so loudly

  that perhaps as you walked down the street you turned

  on hearing your name’s decibels

  sing from pavement, hoardings and walls

  until like glass from last night’s disasters

  your name shattered. Soon sweeper
s will come

  and all my love of you will vanish

  as if it had never been.

  Meanwhile, hurry before lateness catches you,

  run until the wind blows out your coat,

  don’t stand irresolute

  like me, thinking too loudly.

  The Kingdom of the Dead

  The kingdom of the dead is like an owl

  in the heart of the city, hunting

  at the Downs’ margin.

  Over Carter’s Steam Fair,

  over the illicitly parked cars

  where lovers tighten and quicken,

  it glides with a tilt of the wing.

  The kingdom of the dead is like a mouse

  in the owl’s eye, a streak of brown

  at the Downs’ margin.

  Under the bright hooves of Carter’s horses it hides

  this mouse, a drop of water

  which flows in its terror

  into a beer can.

  The kingdom of the dead is like the boot

  of a boy in the bliss of fair-time

  rucking the grass at the Downs’ margin.

  Carter’s is turning out now, he runs

  in and out of the horses

  and kicks the beer can

  into the touch of heaven.

  The Last Heartbeat

  The last heartbeat washes the body clean of pain

  in a tide of endorphins,

  the last sound coils into the ears, and stirs

  ossicles, cochlea, the tiny hairs.

  For a day or more

  long after the onlookers

  have turned away

  thinking it’s all over

  the firework show of synapses

  and the glorious near-touch

  of axons in the brain

  slowly dies down

  to a last, exquisite connection.

  The Old Mastery

  Weary and longing to go home

  you dress slowly.

  Not much of your wardrobe likes you.

  You reach for those trousers again

  and buff up your shoes

  with the old mastery.

  The Overcoat

  It wears a smell of earth, not air.

  I am under it forever.

  Sometimes I sleep, sometimes I shiver.

  There is a map and I am on it.

  the bed’s icy geography

  is iron, dust-devil, ticking.

  Sometimes I fetch from my dreams

  the shapes of neighbours, friends,

  the smell of rubber perishing.

  Sometimes the bed-springs groan

  under the weight of the coat.

  It will not let me out.

  I hold fear so steadily

  it stays all in one piece.

  I hold the coat’s collar.

  I hold my breath while the ghost

  that lives inside it slides past me

  and is bequeathed.

  Window Cleaners at Ladysmith Road

  Some swear by vinegar and some by newspaper.

  Some brandish a shammy leather.

  Here they come with their creamy forearms,

  their raw red hands, pinnies and aprons

  until they stand at my shoulder.

  I smell them but don’t dare turn.

  They are judging smears on the glass,

  and as for me and the present

  they’ll soon have that off.

  A warped shine shows the street buckling

  into the past, as helpless as I am

  not to reflect those boys on the corner

  smoking Woodbines from the tobacconist’s

  which no longer exists.

  I Heard You Sing in the Dark

  (for Tess)

  I heard you sing in the dark

  a few clear notes on the stairs

  a blackbird in the cold of dusk

  forever folding your wings

  and slipping, rustling down

  past leaves and ivy knots

  to where your song bubbled

  out of the crevices

  into cold, clear February dusk.

  I heard the notes plain

  rising to the surface

  of evening and then down again

  almost chuckling, in a blackbird’s cold

  liquid delight, and so I turned

  on the landing, and you were gone.

  La Recouvrance

  The schooner La Recouvrance is almost at the horizon now, sailing south-west. Much closer, the sea is recovering ground. In town the equinoctial spring tides will bring water up the slipway, over the wall and into the sandbagged streets. But here the tide can rise as far as it likes. This cove will be swallowed up soon. Anyone foolish enough to wait too long before they climb the rocks will be washed away like their own footprints. Each small, collapsing wave darkens another arc of the white sand. If you watch it like this you’ll be entranced and you won’t move until it’s too late. Today the sea has a particular smell that isn’t like sea at all. If you had your eyes closed you would guess at flowers in the distance. Nothing sweet or perfumed, but a sharp, early narcissus.

  You’ve brought the child down here with you, although it’s not very safe. You lift her over the clefts and gullies, carrying everything you need in a back-pack and coming back for her. She waits for you obediently, perched above the drop.

  There are just the two of you in the sea. Thigh deep, and now waist deep. The incoming tide pushes against you, and you hold the child’s hand, but there are no rips here. Every so often a wave lifts her off her feet. She can swim quite strongly now, and the lift of the sea makes her laugh, showing her sharp little teeth. She dips her head under a wave and brings it up. Her long hair is plastered to her skull and water streams down her face, shining.

  You say it’s time to go now. She swims into your arms and her strong, cold little body clings to yours. She winds her legs around your waist. Together you stagger towards the shore, but while you are still in the sea’s embrace you turn back to see La Recouvrance one last time. Her tall masts have vanished. Already she has dipped below the horizon, as she sails away to the bottom of the world.

  The Filament

  Step by step, holding the thread,

  step by step into the dark,

  step by step, holding a flag of light

  where the tunnel in secrecy closes

  like fist or crocus.

  My footsteps follow your footsteps

  into the dark where they are still

  after all these years

  just beyond my hearing,

  so I call to you in the language

  that even now we speak

  because you taught me to be haunted

  by the catch and space of it –

  because we paid for it.

  At the tunnel’s end a black lake,

  a small, desultory boat,

  the pluck of the water

  as the boat shapes from the shore

  while a boatman reads his newspaper

  with a desultory air.

  The cave roof glistens.

  The ribs and flanks of the chamber

  all give back the dark water.

  I am ready for the journey –

  Shall we take ship together? –

  Shall we lift my torch into the boat

  and sit athwart?

  Shall we pass our hands quickly

  through crocus and saffron

  like children playing with matches?

  Even if the boat never sets sail

  we can be content,

  and I won’t look at your face

  or write another word.

  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.<
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  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

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Helen Dunmore 2012

  First published 2012 by

  Bloodaxe Books Ltd,

  Highgreen,

  Tarset,

  Northumberland NE48 1RP.

  This ebook edition first published in 2012.

  www.bloodaxebooks.com

  For further information about Bloodaxe titles