Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 Read online

out of the bathroom mirror the sky

  is blue and pale as a Chinese mountain.

  and I breathe in.

  It’s time to go now. I take nothing

  but breath, thinned.

  A blown-out dandelion globe

  might choose my laundered body to grow in.

  Patrick I

  Patrick, I cannot write

  such poems for you as a father might

  coming upon your smile,

  your mouth half sucking, half sleeping,

  your tears shaken from your eyes like sparklers

  break up the nightless weeks of your life:

  lighthearted, I go to the kitchen

  and cook breakfast, aching as you grow hungry.

  Mornings are plain as the pages

  of books in sedentary schooldays.

  If I were eighty and lived next door

  hanging my pale chemises on the porch

  would I envy or pity my neighbour?

  Polished and still as driftwood

  she stands smoothing her dahlias;

  liquid, leaking,

  I cup the baby’s head to my shoulder:

  the child’s a boy and will not share

  one day these obstinate, exhausted mornings.

  Patrick II

  The other babies were more bitter than you

  Patrick, with your rare, tentative cry,

  your hours of steep, snuffing the medical air.

  Give me time for your contours, your fierce drinking.

  Like land that has been parched for half a summer

  and smiles, sticky with feeding

  I have examined and examined you

  at midnight, at two days; I have accompanied you

  to the blue world on another floor of the hospital

  where half-formed babies open their legs like anemones

  and nurses, specialised as astronauts,

  operate around the apnoea pillows.

  But here you bloomed. You survived,

  sticky with nectar. X-rayed, clarified,

  you came back, dirty and peaceful.

  And now like sunflowers settling their petals

  for the last strokes of light in September

  your eyes turn to me at 3 a.m.

  You meet my stiff, mucousy face

  and snort, beating your hand on my breast

  as one more feed flows through the darkness, timed

  to nothing now but the pull of your mouth.

  Weaning

  Cool as sleep, the crates ring.

  Birds stir and my milk stings me;

  you slip my grasp. I never find you

  in dreams – only your mouth

  not crying

  your sleep still pressing on mine.

  The carpets shush. The house back silences.

  I turn with you, wide-lipped

  blue figure

  into the underground of babies

  and damp mothers fumbling at bras

  and the first callus grows on us

  weaned from your night smiles.

  Approaches to winter

  Now I write off a winter of growth.

  First, hands batting the air,

  forehead still smeared,

  – now, suddenly, he stands there

  upright and rounded as a tulip.

  The garden sparkles through the windows.

  Dark and a heap in my arms;

  the thermostat clicking all night.

  Out in the road beached cars and winter

  so cold five minutes would finish you.

  Light fell in its pools

  each evening. Tranquilly

  it stamped the same circles.

  Friends shifted their boots on the step.

  Their faces gleamed from their scarves

  that the withdrawal of day

  brought safety.

  Experience so stitched, intimate,

  mutes me.

  Now I’m desperate for solitude.

  The house enrages me.

  I go miles, pushing the pram,

  thinking about Christina Rossetti’s

  black dresses – my own absent poems.

  I go miles, touching his blankets proudly,

  drawing the quilt to his lips.

  I write of winter and the approaches to winter.

  Air clings to me, rotten Lord Derbies,

  patched in their skins, thud down.

  The petals of Michaelmas daisies give light.

  Now I’m that glimpsed figure for children

  occupying doorways and windows;

  that breath of succulence

  ignored till nightfall.

  I go out before the curtains are drawn

  and walk close to the windows

  which shine secretly.

  Bare to the street

  red pleats of a lampshade expose

  bodies in classic postures, arguing.

  Their senseless jokes explode with saliva.

  I mop and tousle.

  It’s three o’clock in the cul-de-sac.

  Out of the reach of traffic,

  free from the ply

  of bodies glancing and crossing,

  the shopping, visiting,

  cashing orders at the post office,

  I lie on my bed in the sun

  drawing down streams of babble.

  This room holds me, a dull

  round bulb stubbornly

  rising year after year in the same place.

  The night chemist

  In the chemist’s at night-time

  swathed counters and lights turned down

  lean and surround us.

  Waiting for our prescriptions

  we clock these sounds:

  a baby’s peaked hush,

  hawked breath.

  I pay a pound

  and pills fall in my curled palms.

  Holding their white packages tenderly

  patients track back to the pain.

  ‘Why is the man shouting?’ Oliver asks me.

  I answer, ‘He wants to go home.’

  Softly, muffled by cloth

  the words still come

  and the red-streaked drunkard goes past us,

  rage scalding us.

  I would not dare bring happiness

  into the chemist’s at night-time.

  Its gift-wrapped lack of assistance still presses

  as suffering closes the blinded windows.

  St Paul’s

  This evening clouds darken the street quickly,

  more and more grey

  flows throngh the yellowing treetops,

  traffic flies downhill

  roaring and spangled with faces,

  full buses

  rock past the Sussex Place roundabout.

  In Sussex the line of Downs

  has no trees to uncover,

  no lick of the town’s wealth, blue

  in smoke, no gold, fugitive dropping.

  In villages old England

  checks rainfall, sick of itself.

  Here there are scraps and flashes:

  bellying food smells – last-minute buying –

  plantain, quarters of ham.

  The bread shop lady pulls down

  loaves that will make tomorrow’s cheap line.

  On offer are toothpaste and shoe soles

  mended same day for Monday’s interview

  and a precise network of choices

  for old women collecting their pension

  on Thursday, already owing the rent man.

  Some places are boarded. You lose your expectancy –

  soon it appears you never get home. Still

  it’s fine on evenings and in October

  to settle here. Still the lights splashing look beautiful.

  Poem for December 28

  My nephews with almond faces

  black hair like bunces of grapes

  (the skin stroked and then bruised

&nb
sp; the head buried and caressed)

  he takes his son’s head in his hands

  kisses it blesses it leaves it:

  the boy with circles under his eyes like damsons

  not the blond baby, the stepson.

  In the forest stories about the black

  father the jew the incubus

  if there are more curses they fall on us.

  Behind the swinging ropes of their isolation

  my nephews wait, sucking their sweets.

  The hall fills quickly and neatly.

  If they keep still as water

  I’ll know them.

  I look but I can’t be certain:

  my nephews with heavy eyelids

  blowing in the last touches of daylight

  my sisters raising them up like torches.

  Greenham Common

  Today is barred with darkness of winter.

  In cold tents women protest,

  for once unveiled, eyes stinging with smoke.

  They stamp round fires in quilted anoraks,

  glamourless, they laugh often

  and teach themselves to speak eloquently.

  Mud and the camp’s raw bones

  set them before the television camera.

  Absent, the women of old photographs

  holding the last of their four children,

  eyes darkened, hair covered,

  bodies waxy as cyclamen;

  absent, all these suffering ones.

  New voices rip at the throat,

  new costumes, metamorphoses.

  Soft-skirted, evasive

  women were drawn from the ruins,

  swirls of ash on them like veils.

  History came as a seducer

  and said: this is the beauty of women

  in bombfall. Dolorous

  you curl your skirts over your sleeping children.

  Instead they stay at this place

  all winter; eat from packets and jars,

  keep sensible, don’t hunger,

  battle each day at the wires.

  Poem for hidden women

  ‘Fuck this staring paper and table –

  I’ve just about had enough of it.

  I’m going out for some air,’

  he says, letting the wind bang up his sheets of poems.

  He walks quickly; it’s cool,

  and rainy sky covers both stars and moon.

  Out of the windows come slight

  echoes of conversations receding upstairs.

  There. He slows down.

  A dark side-street – thick bushes –

  he doesn’t see them.

  He smokes. Leaves can stir as they please.

  (We clack like jackrabbits from pool to pool of lamplight.

  Stretching our lips, we walk exposed

  as milk cattle past heaps of rubbish

  killed by the edge

  of knowledge that trees hide

  a face slowly detaching itself

  from shadow, and starting to smile.)

  The poet goes into the steep alleys

  close to the sea, where fish scales line the gutter

  and women prostitute themselves to men

  as men have described in many poems.

  They’ve said how milky, or bitter

  as lemons they find her –

  the smell of her hair

  …vanilla…cinnamon…

  there’s a smell for every complexion.

  Cavafy tells us he went always

  to secret rooms and purer vices;

  he wished to dissociate himself

  from the hasty unlacings of citizens

  fumbling, capsizing –

  white

  flesh in a mound and kept from sight,

  but he doesn’t tell us

  whether these boys’ hair always smelled of cinnamon

  or if their nights cost more than spices.

  A woman goes into the night café,

  chooses a clean

  knife and a spoon

  and takes up her tray.

  Quickly the manageress leans from the counter.

  (As when a policeman arrests a friend

  her eyes plunge and her voice roughens.)

  She points to a notice with her red nail:

  ‘After 11 we serve only accompanied females.’

  The woman fumbles her grip

  on her bag, and it slips.

  Her forces tumble.

  People look on as she scrabbles

  for money and tampax.

  A thousand shadows accompany her

  down the stiff lino, through the street lighting.

  The poet sits in a harbour bar

  where the tables are smooth and solid to lean on.

  It’s peaceful. Men gaze

  for hours at beer and brass glistening.

  The sea laps. The door swings.

  The poet feels poems

  invade him. All day he has been stone-breaking

  he says. He would be happier in cafés

  in other countries, drinking, watching;

  he feels he’s a familiar sort of poet

  but he’s at ease with it.

  Besides, he’s not actually writing a poem:

  there’s plenty, he’s sure,

  in drink and hearing the sea move.

  For what is Emily Dickinson doing

  back at the house – the home?

  A doctor emerges, wiping his face,

  and pins a notice on the porch.

  After a while you don’t even ask.

  No history

  gets at this picture:

  a woman named Sappho

  sat in bars by purple water

  with her feet crossed at the ankles

  and her hair flaming with violets

  never smiling when she didn’t feel like it.

  ‘End here, it’s hopeful,’

  says the poet, getting up from the table.

  If no revolution come

  If no revolution come

  star clusters

  will brush heavy on the sky

  and grapes burst

  into the mouths of fifteen

  well-fed men,

  these honest men

  will build them houses like pork palaces

  if no revolution come,

  short-life dust children

  will be crumbling in the sun –

  they have to score like this

  if no revolution come.

  The sadness of people

  don’t look at it too long:

  you’re studying for madness

  if no revolution come.

  If no revolution come

  it will be born sleeping,

  it will be heavy as baby

  playing on mama’s bones,

  it will be gun-thumping on Sunday

  and easy good time

  for men who make money,

  for men who make money

  grow like a roof

  so the rubbish of people

  can’t live underneath.

  If no revolution come

  star clusters

  will drop heavy from the sky

  and blood burst

  out of the mouths of fifteen

  washing women,

  and the land-owners will drink us

  one body by one:

  they have to score like this

  if no revolution come.

  A safe light

  I hung up the sheets in moonlight,

  surprised that it really was so

  steady, a quickly moving pencil

  flowing onto the stained cotton.

  How the valves

  in that map

  of taut fabric

  blew in and blew out

  then spread flat

  over the tiles

  while the moon filled them with light.

  A hundred feet above the town

  for once the moonscape showed nothing extra
ordinary

  only the clicking pegs

  and radio news from our kitchen.

  One moth hesitated

  tapping at our lighted window

  and in the same way the moonlight

  covered the streets, all night.

  Near Dawlish

  Her fast asleep face turns from me,

  the oil on her eyelids gleams

  and the shadow of a removed moustache

  darkens the curve of her mouth,

  her lips are still flattened together

  and years occupy her face,

  her holiday embroidery glistens,

  her fingers quiver then rest.

  I perch in my pink dress

  sleepiness fanning my cheeks,

  not lurching, not touching

  as the train leaps.

  Mother you should not be sleeping.

  Look how dirty my face is, and lick

  the smuts off me with your salt spit.

  Golden corn rocks to the window

  as the train jerks. Your narrowing body leaves me

  frightened, too frightened to cry for you.

  The last day of the exhausted month