Out of the Blue

by Helen Dunmore

  shorts that looked nice in the shop

  then two days’ indoor bicycling

  to get his legs ready.

  He plans to learn something in lonely.

  Bits of the language, new dishes.

  He would like to try out a sport –

  jet-ski maybe, or fishing.

  You are meant to be alone, fishing.

  There are books about it at the airport.

  In the departure lounge, he has three hours

  to learn to harpoon a marlin

  and to overhear the history

  of that couple quarrelling

  about Bourbon and Jamesons –

  which is the best way to have fun.

  He is starting to like the look of lonely

  with its steady climate, its goals

  anyone can touch. He settles

  for drinking lots of Aqua Libra

  and being glad about Airmiles

  as the Australian across the aisle

  plugs into Who’s That Girl?

  Poem in a Hotel

  Waiting. I’m here waiting

  like a cable-car caught in a thunderstorm.

  At six someone will feed me, at seven

  I’ll stroll and sit by the band.

  I have never seen so many trombones

  taking the air, or so many mountains.

  Under them there are tunnels

  to a troll’s salt-garden.

  The lake is a dirty thumb-mark.

  If nowhere has a middle

  this lake is its navel,

  pregnant with sickeningly large carp.

  Bent as if travelling backwards, the birches

  wipe the cheeks of 29 parasols.

  A little girl scythes at her shuttlecock:

  4, 6, 7 strokes –

  there are 29 bright parasols

  outfacing the sun

  and the little girl wears a red cap

  to blunt her vision.

  I lie through half a morning

  with my eyelids gummed down,

  neither rising nor falling

  until the next meal comes round.

  I keep a straw in my mouth

  so I can breathe,

  I am drinking Sprite in a hotel,

  I am a carp in the reeds.

  The Bike Lane

  Of course they’re dead, or this is a film.

  Along the promenade the sun

  moves down council-painted white lanes –

  these are for cycling. On the other hand

  the sea is going quietly out to France,

  taking its time. If the cliffs are white,

  iron stanchions are planted in them

  so a bleed of rust can be seen

  by the army rafting its way in

  on lilos and pedalos. Professional cyclists

  walk with one hand on the saddle,

  waiting to be told to put on

  red vests which show up in the race.

  The aisle of the falling tide

  squints to infinity, the bike-lane

  is much in need of repainting

  like the smile of the sea-front towards France.

  In the less-than-shelter of the beach huts

  two people I love are waiting

  with as much infinity in their laps

  as you can catch with a red vest on.

  The cyclists flash past them –

  one turns his keyed-up white face

  but they are dead and this is a film.

  Drink and the Devil

  On his skin the stink

  of last night turned

  to acetaldehyde.

  What comes through the curtains must be light.

  It combs the shadows of his brain

  and frightens him.

  Things not to think of crowd in.

  The things she said

  as if sick of saying them.

  The jumpy blanks in what happened.

  The way he skidded and there

  was the kid looking,

  staring through the bars of the landing

  so I shouted Monkey, Monkey

  and danced but he wouldn’t laugh.

  Or was that in the club?

  I would never harm a hair

  on the head of him.

  If she doesn’t know that she knows nothing.

  Ahvenanmaa

  Breast to breast against the azaleas

  they pitch, father and daughter,

  the sun throws itself down

  golden, glittering,

  pale orange petals clutter their hair

  as he catches her shoulders,

  braced, they grapple and bruise

  among the perfumed azaleas.

  The flowers loll out their tongues,

  tigers on dark stems

  while breast to breast against the azaleas

  they pitch, father and daughter.

  The ferry slides between islands.

  Pale and immediate, the sun rises.

  The hull noses white marker-posts

  glittering in summer water –

  here, now, the channel deepens,

  the sky darkens. Too cold in her dress

  the girl scutters. Engine vents veil

  steam while rain hides Ahvenanmaa.

  Rubbing Down the Horse

  The thing about a saddle is that second

  you see it so closely, sweat-grains

  pointing the leather,

  pulled stitching and all, and the pommel gone black

  and reins wrapped over themselves.

  You see it so closely

  because you have one foot in the stirrup

  and someone else has your heel in his hand.

  Your heel in someone else’s hand

  that second before they lift you, your face

  turned to the saddle, the sweat marks

  and smell of the horse, those stitches pulling

  the way they tug and tear in your flesh

  when you lie there in pain,

  the hooves of it cutting,

  trying to pin down the place, the time.

  The nurse has your heel in her hand

  yellow and still, already tender

  though on Friday you were walking.

  She is taking a pinprick

  or else slowly, bit by bit, washing

  your wrapped body from the heels upward

  and talking, always talking.

  She might want to ask someone

  what way you would move when sunlight

  filled the cobbles like straw,

  or how without looking at it

  you’d kick in place a zinc bucket

  then bend and rub down the horse.

  You came back to life in its sweetness

  You came back to life in its sweetness,

  to keen articulations of the knee joint,

  to slow replays of balls kicking home

  and the gape of the goalkeeper.

  You came back to life in its sweetness,

  to the smell of sweat, the night-blue

  unwrinkling of the iris,

  and going from table to table at parties.

  Perhaps you’ll waltz

  on some far-off anniversary

  with an elderly woman

  who doesn’t exist yet,

  and you, you’ll forget,

  for now we’re counting in years,

  where we were counting in hours.

  Heimat

  Deep in busy lizzies and black iron

  he sleeps for the Heimat,

  and his photograph slips in and out of sight

  as if breathing.

  There are petals against his cheeks

  but he is not handsome.

  His small eyes search the graveyard fretfully

  and the flesh of his cheeks clouds

  the bones of heroism.

  No one can stop him being young

  and he is so tired of being young.

&
nbsp; He would like to feel pain in his joints

  as he wanders down to Hübers,

  but he’s here as always,

  always on his way back from the photographer’s

  in his army collar

  with a welt on his neck rubbed raw.

  The mountains are white and sly as they always were.

  Old women feed the graveyard with flowers,

  clear the glass on his photograph

  with chamois leathers,

  bend and whisper the inscription.

  They are his terrible suitors.

  In the Desert Knowing Nothing

  Here I am in the desert knowing nothing,

  here I am knowing nothing

  in the desert of knowing nothing,

  here I am in this wide

  desert long after midnight

  here I am knowing nothing

  hearing the noise of the rain

  and the melt of fat in the pan

  here is our man on the phone knowing something

  and here’s our man fresh from the briefing

  in combat jeans and a clip microphone

  testing for sound,

  catching the desert rain, knowing something,

  here’s the general who’s good with his men

  storming the camera, knowing something

  in the pit of his Americanness

  here’s the general taut in his battledress

  and knowing something

  here’s the boy washing his kit in a tarpaulin

  on a front-line he knows from his GCSE

  coursework on Wilfred Owen

  and knowing something

  here is the plane banking,

  the go go go of adrenalin

  the child melting

  and here’s the grass that grows overnight

  from the desert rain, feeling for him

  and knowing everything

  and here I am knowing nothing

  in the desert of knowing nothing

  dry from not speaking.

  Poem on the Obliteration of 100,000 Iraqi Soldiers

  They are hiding away in the desert,

  hiding in sand which is growing warm

  with the hot season,

  they are hiding from bone-wagons

  and troops in protective clothing

  who will not look at them,

  the crowds were appalled on seeing him,

  so disfigured did he look

  that he seemed no longer human.

  That killed head straining through the windscreen

  with its frill of bubbles in the eye-sockets

  is not trying to tell you something –

  it is telling you something.

  Do not look away,

  permit them, permit them –

  they are telling their names to the Marines

  in one hundred thousand variations,

  but no one is counting,

  do not turn away,

  for God is counting

  all of us who are silent

  holding our newspapers up, hiding.

  The Yellow Sky

  That morning when the potato tops rusted,

  the mangle rested and the well ran dry

  and the turf house leaned like a pumpkin

  against the yellow sky

  there was a fire lit in the turf house

  and a thin noise of crying,

  and under the skinny sheets a woman

  wadded with cloth against bleeding.

  That morning her man went to the fields

  after a shy pause at the end of her bed,

  trying not to pick out the smell of her blood,

  but she turned and was quiet.

  All day the yellow sky walked on the turves

  and she thought of things heavy to handle,

  her dreams sweated with burdens,

  the bump and grind of her mangle.

  All day the child creaked in her cradle

  like a fire as it sinks

  and the woman crooned when she was able

  across the impossible inches.

  At that moment at the horizon there came a horseman

  pressed to the saddle, galloping, galloping

  fast as the whoop of an ambulance siren –

  and just as unlikely. What happened

  was slower and all of a piece.

  She died. He lived (the man in the fields),

  the child got by on a crust

  and lived to be thirty, with sons. In the end

  we came to be born too. Just.

  Getting the Strap

  The Our Father, the moment of fear.

  He dodged round us and ran,

  but was fetched back again

  to stand before us on the platform.

  The Our Father, the moment of fear

  as the fist gripped and he hung

  from the headmaster’s arm,

  doubling on the spot like a rabbit

  blind for home.

  The Our Father, the moment of fear.

  The watch he’d stolen was given

  back to its owner, dumb

  in the front row, watching the strapping.

  The Our Father, the moment of fear.

  The strap was old and black and it cracked

  on belly buttock and once across his lip

  because he writhed and twisted.

  He would not stand and take it.

  The Our Father, the moment of fear.

  There was a lot of sun

  leaking through churchy windows

  onto a spurt of urine.

  After an age of watching

  we sang the last hymn.

  Adders

  This path is silky with dust

  where a lizard balances across bracken fronds

  and a brown butterfly opens wide

  to the stroke of the sun,

  where a trawler feels its way along the sandbanks

  and two yachts, helplessly paired, tack far out

  like the butterflies which have separated and gone quiet.

  A wild damson tree bulges with wasps

  among heaps that are not worth picking,

  and there a branch splits white with the lightning

  of too heavy a harvest.

  The lizard is gone in a blink.

  Its two-pronged tail – half withered, half growing –

  flicks out of the sun.

  For a moment the pulse in its throat

  keeps the grass moving.

  A grass-bound offering of yarrow,

  rosebay willow herb and veined convolvulus

  lies to one side of the path

  as if someone’s coming back.

  Instead, the sift of the dust –

  beneath the bracken these hills are full of adders.

  The conception

  In the white sheets I gave you

  everything I am capable of –

  at the wrong time

  of the month we opened

  to the conception,

  you were dewed like a plum

  when at two a.m.

  you reached under the bed

  for a drink of water adrift

  in yesterday’s clothes,

  our sheets were a rope

  caught between our thighs,

  we might easily have died

  but we kept on climbing.

  Scan at 8 weeks

  The white receiver

  slides up my vagina,

  I turn and you’ve come,

  though I’m much too old for this

  and you’re much too young.

  That’s the baby

  says the radiographer.

  You are eight millimetres long

  and pulsing,

  bright in the centre of my much-used womb

  which to my astonishment

  still looks immaculate.

  You are all heart,

  I watch you tick and tick

  and won
der

  what you will come to,

  will this be our only encounter

  in the white gallery of ultrasound

  or are you staying?

  One day will we talk about this

  moment when I first saw your spaceship

  far off, heading for home?

  Pedalo

  She swam to me smiling, her teeth

  pointed by salt water, her mouth

  a rock-pool’s spat-out wine gum,

  and then the tide flung

  over her threshold,

  and her lips moved.

  The valve of her mouth was plumed

  with salt-sweet tendrils,

  sea danced from her pelt

  of oil and muscle,

  she rested her elbows on my pedalo

  and there she hung

  browning the pads of her shoulders

  like a snake in the sun.

  On shore thunderhead pines

  drifted and swelled

  like August umbrellas

  stunning the fronts of hotels.

  The sharp tide rinsed

  over her threshold

  as she dived once

  and an angler cast