Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 Read online

  and saw the boys’ wet heads glittering,

  their hooting, diving

  bodies sweeping them out of the bay.

  In deep water

  For three years I’ve been wary of deep water.

  I busied myself on the shore

  towelling, handing out underwear

  wading the baby knee-high.

  I didn’t think I had forgotten

  how to play in the deep water,

  but it was only today I went there

  passing the paddle boats and bathers,

  the parallel harbour wall,

  until there was no one at all but me

  rolling through the cold water

  and scarcely bothering to swim

  from pure buoyancy.

  Of course I could still see them:

  the red and the orange armbands,

  the man smiling and pointing seawards,

  the tender faces.

  It’s these faces that have taken me

  out of the deep water

  and made my face clench like my mother’s

  once, as I pranced on a ten-foot

  wall over a glass-house.

  The water remembers my body,

  stretched and paler as it is.

  Down there is my old reflection

  spread-eagled, steadily moving.

  Lady Macduff and the primroses

  Now the snowdrop, the wood-anemone, the crocus

  have flowered

  and faded back to dry, scarcely-seen threads,

  Lady Macduff goes down to the meadow

  where primrose flowers are thickening.

  Her maid told her this morning, It’s time

  to pick them now, there will never be more

  without some dying.

  Even the kitchen girls, spared for an hour,

  come to pick flowers for wine.

  The children’s nurse has never seemed to grasp

  that she only need lay down the flowers loosely,

  the flat-bottomed baskets soon fill

  with yellow, chill primroses covered by sturdy leaves,

  but the nurse will weave posies

  even though the children are impatient

  and only care who is first, has most

  of their mother’s quick smile.

  Pasties have been brought from the castle.

  Savoury juices spill from their ornate crusts,

  white cloths are smeared with venison gravy

  and all eat hungrily

  out in the spring wind.

  Lady Macduff looks round at the sparkling

  sharpness of grass, whipped kerchiefs and castle battlements

  edged with green light

  and the primroses like a fall

  colder than rain, warmer than snow,

  petals quite still, hairy stems helplessly curling.

  She thinks how they will be drunk

  as yellow wine, swallow by swallow

  filling the pauses of mid-winter,

  sweet to raw throats.

  Mary Shelley

  No living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgement upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers.

  PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

  In the weightlessness of time and our passage within it

  voices and rooms swim.

  Cleft after soft cleft

  parts, word-covered lips

  thin as they speak.

  I should recall how pink and tender

  your lids looked when you read too long

  while I produced seamed

  patchwork, my own phantom.

  Am I the jury, the evidence,

  the recollection?

  Last night I dreamed of a prospect

  and so I dreamed backwards:

  first I woke in the dark

  scraping my knuckles on board and mould.

  I remember half listening

  or reading in the shadow of a fire;

  each evening I would lie quietly

  breathing the scent of my flesh till I slept.

  I loved myself in my new dress.

  I loved the coral stems rising from the rosebush

  under my window in March.

  I was intact, neat,

  dressing myself each morning.

  I dreamed my little baby was alive,

  mewing for me from somewhere in the room.

  I chafed her feet and tucked her nightdress close.

  Claire, Shelley and I left England.

  We crossed the Channel and boasted afterwards

  of soaked clothes, vomit and cloudbursts.

  We went by grey houses, shutters still closed,

  people warmly asleep. My eyes were dazed

  wide open in abatement and vacancy.

  *

  A bad wife is like winter in the house.

  (diary of Claire Clairmont, Florence 1820)

  In Florence in winter grit scoured between houses;

  the plaster needed replacing, the children had coughs.

  I lived in a nursery which smelled of boredom and liniment.

  In bed I used to dream of water crossings

  by night. I looked fixedly forward.

  It was the first winter I became ugly:

  I was unloving all winter,

  frozen by my own omens.

  In Lerici I watched small boats on the bay

  trace their insect trails on the flat water.

  Orange lamps and orange blossom

  lit and suffused the night garden.

  Canvas slashed in a squall.

  Stifling tangles of sail and fragile

  masts snapping brought the boat over.

  The blackened sea

  kept its waves still, then tilting

  knocked you into its cold crevices.

  I was pressed to a pinpoint,

  my breath flat.

  Scarcely pulsating

  I gave out nothing.

  I gave out nothing before your death.

  We would pass in the house with blind-lipped

  anger in me.

  You put me aside for the winter.

  I would soften like a season

  I would moisten and turn to you.

  I would not conform my arms to the shapes of dead children.

  I patched my babies and fed them

  but death got at them.

  Your eyes fed everywhere.

  I wonder at bodies once clustered,

  at delicate tissue

  emerging unable to ripen.

  Each time I returned to life

  calmer than the blood which left me

  weightless as the ticking of a blind-cord.

  Inside my amply-filled dress

  I am renewed seamlessly.

  Fledged in my widow’s weeds

  I was made over, for this

  prickle of live flesh

  wedged in its own corpulence.

  The plum tree

  The plum was my parents’ tree,

  above them

  as I was at my bedroom window

  wondering why they chose to walk this way quietly

  under the plum tree.

  My sisters and I stopped playing

  as they reached up and felt for the fruit.

  It lay among bunches of leaves,

  oval and oozing resin

  out into pearls of gum.

  They bit into the plums

  without once glancing

  back at the house.

  Some years were thin:

  white mildew streaking the trunk,

  fruit buckled and green,

  but one April

  the tree broke from its temperate blossoming

  and by late summer the branches

  trailed earth, heavy with pound

  after pound of bursting Victorias,

  and I remember the oblivious steps

  my parents took as the
y went quietly

  out of the house one summer evening

  to stand under the plum tree.

  The air-blue gown

  Tonight I’m eating the past

  consuming its traces,

  the past is a heap

  sparkling with razor blades

  where patches of sweetness

  deepen to compost,

  woodlice fold up their legs

  and roll luxuriously,

  cold vegetation

  rises to blood heat.

  The local sea’s bare

  running up to the house

  tufting its waves

  with red seaweed

  spread against a Hebridean noon.

  Lightly as sandpipers marking the shoreline

  boats at the jetty sprang

  and rocked upon the green water.

  Not much time passes, but suddenly

  now when you’re crumpled after a cold

  I see how the scale and changes

  of few words measure us.

  At this time of year I remember a cuckoo’s

  erratic notes on a mild morning.

  It lay full-fed on a cherry branch

  repeating an hour of sweetness

  its grey body unstirring

  its lustrous eyes turning.

  Talk sticks and patches

  walls and the kitchen formica

  while at the table outlines

  seated on a thousand evenings

  drain like light going out of a landscape.

  The back door closes, swings shut,

  drives me to place myself inside it.

  In this flickering encampment

  fire pours sideways

  then once more stands

  evenly burning.

  I wake with a touch on my face

  and turn sideways

  butting my head into darkness.

  The wind’s banging diminishes. An aircraft

  wanders through the upper atmosphere

  bee-like, propelled by loneliness.

  It searches for a fallen corolla,

  its note rising and going

  as it crosses the four quarters.

  The city turns a seamed cheek upward,

  confides itself to the sound and hazardous

  construction of a journey by starlight.

  I drop back soundlessly,

  my lips slackened.

  Headache alone is my navigator,

  plummeting, shedding its petals.

  It’s Christmas Eve.

  Against my nightdress a child’s foot, burning,

  passes its fever through the cotton,

  the tide of bells swings

  and the child winces.

  The bells are shamelessly

  clanging, the voices

  hollering churchward.

  I’m eating the past tonight

  tasting gardenia perfume

  licking the child-like socket of an acorn

  before each is consumed.

  It was not Hardy who stayed there

  searching for the air-blue gown.

  It was the woman who once more, secretly,

  tried the dress on.

  My sad descendants

  O wintry ones, my sad descendants,

  with snowdrops in your hands you join me

  to celebrate these dark, short

  days lacking a thread of sun.

  Three is a virtuous number,

  each time one fewer to love,

  the number of fairy tales,

  wishes, labours for love.

  My sad descendants

  who had no place in the sun,

  hope brought you to mid-winter,

  never to spring

  or to the lazy benches of summer

  and old bones.

  My sad descendants

  whose bones are a network of frost,

  I carry your burn and your pallor,

  your substance dwindled to drops.

  I breathe you another pattern

  since no breath warmed you from mine,

  on the cold of the night window

  I breathe you another pattern,

  I make you outlive rosiness

  and envied heartbeats.

  Patrick at four years old on Bonfire Night

  Cursing softly and letting the matches drop

  too close to the firework box,

  we light an oblation

  to rough-scented autumnal gods,

  shaggy as chrysanthemums;

  and you, in your pearly maroon

  waterproof suit, with your round

  baby brows, stare upward and name

  chrysanthemum fountain and silver fountain

  and Catherine wheel: saints’ names

  like yours, Patrick, and you record them.

  This morning, climbing up on my pillow,

  you list saints’ names guessed at from school.

  They go off, one by one on the ritual plank:

  jack-in-a-box, high-jump and Roman candle,

  searching the currant bushes with gunpowder.

  We stand in savoury fumes like pillars,

  our coats dark, our slow-burning fuse lit,

  and make our little bonfire with spits

  for foil-wrapped potatoes and hot-dogs –

  by your bedtime

  the rough-scented autumnal gods

  fuse with the saints and jack-lanterns.

  The horse landscape

  Today in a horse landscape

  horses steam in the lee of thorn hedges

  on soaking fields. Horses waltz

  on iron poles in dank fairgrounds.

  A girl in jodhpurs on Sand Bay

  leads her pony over and over

  jumps made of driftwood and traffic cones,

  A TV blares the gabble of photofinishes.

  The bookie’s plastic curtain releases

  punters onto the hot street

  littered with King Cone papers.

  In a landscape with clouds and chalk downs

  and cream houses, a horse rigid as bone

  glares up at kites and hang-gliders.

  One eye’s cut from the flowered turf:

  a horse skull, whispering secrets

  with wind-sighs like tapping on phone wires.

  The group leader in beautiful boots

  always on horse-back,

  the mounted lady squinnying

  down at the hunt intruders,

  draw blood for their own horse landscape

  and scorn horse-trading, letting the beasts mate

  on scrubby fields, amongst catkins

  and watery ditches.

  Here’s a rearing bronze horse

  welded to man, letting his hands

  stay free for banner and weapon –

  mild shadow of Pushkin’s nightmare.

  Trained police horses sway on great hooves.

  Riders avoid our faces, and gaze

  down on our skull crowns

  where the bone jigsaw cleaves.

  Grooms whistle and urge

  the sweaty beasts to endure battle.

  We’re always the poor infantry

  backing off Mars field,

  out of frame for the heroic riders

  preserved in their horse landscape.

  Thetis

  Thetis, mother of all mothers

  who fear the death of their children,

  held down her baby Achilles

  in the dark Styx

  whose waters flow fast

  without ripples or wave-break,

  bearing little boats of paper

  with matchstick masts,

  returning not even a sigh

  or drenched fibre to life.

  Thetis, mother of all mothers

  destined to outlive their children,

  took Achilles by the heel

  and thrust him into the Styx

  so that sealed, immortal, dark-eyed,

>   he’d return to his white cradle

  and to his willow rattle.

  She might have held him less tightly

  and for a while given him

  wholly to the trustworthy river

  which has no eddies or backwaters

  and always carries its burdens onward,

  she might have left him to play

  on the soft grass of the river-edge.

  But through the pressure-marks of her white fingers

  the baby found his way forward

  towards the wound he knew best.

  Even while the arrow was in the wood

  and the bow gleaming with leaves

  the current of the Styx

  faintly suckled and started

  in the little flexed ankles

  pressed against Thetis’ damp breasts.

  In the tents

  Our day off, agreed by the wind

  and miry fields and unburied dead,

  in the tent with first light filtering

  a rosy dawn which masks rain.

  The rosiness rests on our damp flesh,

  on armour stacked by the tent walls,

  on our captain and his lolling companion.

  I go down to the sea shore