Blooms in its case.
There are boys slouched against the wall
Up to no good, there are white-faced girls
Running to the shop for a paper of chips.
There’s the long fall of the Mardyke Steps
Tunneling the bad way to the docks
And so the lamplighters muster
To stop the thieves who can knock you down
Between one lamp and the next,
Between one step and the drop.
The Halt
We stop somewhere on the plain
While I am sleeping. As my book slips
The man opposite leans to stop it
Still chomping that sausage he cut
With a penknife opened and cleaned
On his sleeve, long before I slept.
He pulls down the window-strap and at once
We hear birds scurry in the scrub
That bows and knits to the cuff of the wind.
I turn my face to the glass
For I speak his language painfully
Sentence by sentence, and he will talk to me.
We have halted for no reason
In the white glare of noon
At this shack surrounded by sunflowers
Pothering hens and a plot of maize
Beyond which the land gallops unbroken.
There is also a woman
Who swings a bucket on her arm
As she clambers the makeshift platform
Box upon box, skilfully placed.
She knows all the long curve of the train.
Now from the engine a stoker swings
A stream of water that dings on the iron.
The rails flash so I can barely look at them.
Our engine shucks steam as it canters
Panting, pulling against the brake.
The bucket clangs. The woman steps down.
From my sticky mouth the words come:
Hens, maize, sunflowers,
Her bowed head and the way she waits.
Bluebell Hollows
Are they blue or not blue?
All I know is the smoke
That moves under the trees,
In Tremenheere Woods
Moths clung to the sheet,
It was the hour of innocence –
We developed flowers
On light-sensitive paper:
They are still here.
We could never walk fast enough,
Seven year olds
Up in the dead of night
Climbing to the lookout
Where bonfires blazed
For reasons long forgotten,
But perhaps because the Romans
Once came this far
To walk the bluebell hollows.
A Loose Curl
I have never known you easily
Hold my hand as you do now.
We sit here for hours.
There’s salt all over the glass
And however I look to the horizon
Not a sail to be seen.
I hold your hand and say nothing.
Once I must have held
Your finger, a loose curl.
You remember in snatches.
You say you’re afraid of a whale
Snorkelling through the blue Arctic.
The ice is so fragile.
You must spread your weight, like this
And inch out to the abyss.
This is not a glacier, it’s only
A world of ice falling apart.
I think something is moving slowly
Deep in your fingers.
The sea stays in its lair
But wants to be where we are.
Hornsea, 1952
…I by the tide
Of Humber would complain…
Yes, but were we happy then?
The wind blew from the east, you were always cold,
And there was a boating lake –
Water trapped on your left, below sea level,
Murkily waiting to be stirred by boys with sticks.
You and I must have been conspirators
All those cold days. The two of us.
No books, no essays, no bike propped up
In happy rush. No clangour of bells
Or notes in pigeon-holes:
I can’t wait for you, my darling.
Huge planes take off
Overhead into loneliness,
You bake sponge cakes at four o’clock
For belated homecomings –
Men drink in the Mess.
The fortune-teller saw you kneel
Beside your trunk, packing, unpacking.
The hour for scholarship came round again:
You won. You win
And write Oxford on labels
Flowingly, beneath your name.
A small child drags at your hand.
Another pushes out your belly-button.
You haul at the pram.
The two of us. How the wind blows.
You lose one child and you keep one.
You will change your accent for no one.
You could write an essay on this:
A sozzled officer slow to come home,
Marvell’s vegetable kingdom,
World enough and time,
Another baby fattening
And your thirtieth birthday on the horizon.
Festival of stone
(for Jitka Palmer)
The chink of hammers is a song
Like blackbirds interrupted, alarming
One another in the beauty of the morning
Over the thud of mallets, raspings on stone
As the sculptors bend and sweat
And the skirts of the tents blow out.
The chink of hammers is the wind that plays
On plane leaves keyed to a ripple
In the updraught from the water
And all is flash and shatter
As the surface breaks open
To show the face of the stone.
A Bit of Love
He must stir himself. No more hiding
Behind the skill of hands
That are not his.
Those nurses are good girls.
They’ll do anything for you –
Within reason of course.
He must fumble his old fingers
Get himself moving –
They all say this.
Ambulance bells carouse
Until he doesn’t know where he is.
Drunks in the street
Swaying about like Holy Moses
That’s about the size of it:
No one listens.
The lamplighter went home years ago
There’s no night policeman
Or dawn milk-chink.
That stout world is a trinket
In the eyes of his grandchildren.
His shifts are over.
Here’s a bit of paper
And a book to lean on
What more does he want?
In his well-taught hand-writing
He’ll send her a bit of love
To make her blush.
Winter Balcony with Dunnocks
Close to the earth, creeping, lowly
Mouse-coloured, unglamorous
Dunnocks, your dusty wings flirt
In the dry roots of ivy, you are unnoted
Untweeted creatures, you turn
Dry leaves and peck for grubs.
You come to my balcony, a cloud of you
Eight floors up and slender-dark
Tilting your wings to skirt the railing
And flicker among the geraniums
As the winter cold comes on –
Quick, quick, against the dusk.
You don’t care that someone was here
Before you: those two fat pigeons
Dumpily purring, the noisy ones
Who think I can’t see where they slump
Between flower-pot and pla
stic bucket
Breast to breast, at roost –
No, you are too quick-dark
On the rim of night, flickering
Through the chill buds of the camellia,
Unnoted, untweeted creatures,
Dunnocks, foraging
December and the year’s husk.
Mimosa
Why is the mimosa here
Inside its dark frame?
So down-to-earth, it comes out workmanlike
Year after year, breaks its own branches
With plumes that make the sky quiver.
Let’s sit here, on the bench, under it
To rest while you get your breath.
Winter’s over, and look, in this dustbin
Someone has planted wallflowers.
There’s pollen all over your arms.
Nightfall in the IKEA Kitchen
Nightfall in the IKEA kitchen.
Even though the lights are left on
I feel the push of the wind’s deconstruction
Take the hull of the shed by storm.
Creak and strain of test and fault-finding
But here in the glow I am alone
Expected and consoled. Here is the notice board
Riddled with reminders and invitations,
Here are picture ledges and high cabinets
Kitchen trolley, drying racks
A sly shoe cabinet, fabric pocket-ties:
A life so sweetly cupboarded
I barely believe it is mine. Open
And another light comes on.
Here is the place where I begin again
As a twenty-three year old Finn
Taking the keys of her first home.
I use space well here. I waste nothing.
The floor clock has shelves, the bed lifts up
And if I yield and sleep
I will become part of the storage system
Harbouring dreams and heat.
Everything is a little below scale
And therefore ample. Stuva, Dröma
Expedit, Tromsø, Isfjorden…
I rock in the peace of their names
Even as I mispronounce them
For this is nightfall in the one-bedroom
Model apartment’s kitchen
When everyone has gone home
And there is nothing left
But the Marketplace itself.
And say a child is born, no problem.
With a simple room-divider
I can create not only child storage
But also a home office
From which I will provide for us both.
Look, here is his football on the floor
And here a shelf where it may be stored.
His whole life is in these drawers.
Call him Billy and see him run.
When he grows up and moves out
Just take down the partition
To have, at last, my own space again.
Ten thousand times the wind has pushed the doors
But they have not opened yet.
Those cupboards. Stockholm. Yes, that green
Nature can never quite get.
The Duration
Here they are on the beach where the boy played
For fifteen summers, before he grew too old
For French cricket, shrimping and rock pools.
Here is the place where he built his dam
Year after year. See, the stream still comes down
Just as it did, and spreads itself on the sand
Into a dozen channels. How he enlisted them:
Those splendid spades, those sun-bonneted girls
Furiously shoring up the ramparts.
Here they are on the beach, just as they were
Those fifteen summers. She has a rough towel
Ready for him. The boy was always last out of the water.
She would rub him down hard, chafe him like a foal
Up on its legs for an hour and trembling, all angles.
She would dry carefully between his toes.
Here they are on the beach, the two of them
Sitting on the same square of mackintosh,
The same tartan rug. Quality lasts.
There are children in the water, and mothers patrolling
The sea’s edge, calling them back
From the danger zone beyond the breakers.
How her heart would stab when he went too far out.
Once she flustered into the water, shouting
Until he swam back. He was ashamed of her then.
Wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t look at her even.
Her skirt was sopped. She had to wring out the hem.
She wonders if Father remembers.
Later, when they’ve had their sandwiches
She might speak of it. There are hours yet.
Thousands, by her reckoning.
At the Spit
If you lie down at the Spit on this warm
But sunless afternoon, here on the pebbles,
Smelling the wrack and sea-blown plastic,
If you squint at the clouds that sag on the horizon
Without bringing rain or allowing the sun,
If you lie down here in the hollow
And take your backpack for a pillow
And watch how the pebbles lose colour
And then, shutting your eyes, listen,
You’ll hear the tide swell and the wrack dry
To fool’s balloons, incurably saline
Crackling under the weight of your backpack
As you lie down,
If you lie down and as they say do nothing
You’ll hear the tongue of the tide licking
The Spit – O fine appetite! – You’ll hear the click
And tumble of pebbles, slumbrous
Geography shifting: this is the land mass
And this the plastic, the wrack, the mess
To pick over in search of a home. Go back,
It’s late and the unseen sun’s dropping
Hurts the clouds and turns them to rain.
Drowsy, at home, you lie and dream
Of longboats and long-shed blood
Of corner shops and running for sweets –
O sweet familiarity, geography
Melting into the known –
Terra Incognita
And now we come to the unknown land
With its blue coves and inlets where sweet water
Bubbles against the salt. Its sand
Is ready for footprints. Give me your hand
Onto the rock where the seaweed clings
And the red anemone throbs in its crevice
Through swash and backwash. These things
Various as the brain’s comb and the tide’s swing
Or the first touch of untouched terrain
On our footsoles, as the land explores us,
Have become our fortune. Let me explain
Which foods are good to eat, and which poison.
Four cormorants, one swan
The swans go up with slow wing-beats
That strike off from the surface of the water.
Even the most absorbed games-player
Deep in his mobile, looks up at the clatter
Of six swans’ wings.
After the swans have patrolled their harbour
They settle singly. One drifts with the current
To the house-boat window that always opens,
Another sails towards two cormorants
Hanging out their wings
And two coosing, or fishing
In the shallows beside the jetty.
Now the whole afternoon hangs
In the balance between four cormorants
And a single swan, approaching.
The first cormorant pratfalls from its perch
In an ungainly bundle of wings
Or so it seems. But no, it is flying
Arrowlike to a fish a hundred
yards off.
A lover could not be more direct.
Girl in the Blue Pool
Years back and full of echoes.
Chlorine, urine, raucous
Cuff of voices on broken surface.
A boy on the edge rowdily teeters
And you, knees flexed, arms back
Are on the pulse of your stroke. Suppose
It is you, now, in the pink bikini, close
To making five hundred metres
As the ceiling splinters with echoes.
Suppose you touch the tiles on the turn
And vanish. The churn
Of bubbles streams at your heels
While you shake water out of your ears
To catch the voice of your instructor
Who paces you, outpaces you
On the blue-wet tiles. How her voice echoes.
You should not be wearing a bikini
And you were slow on the turn.
I am years back and full of echoes.
The silver stream where you swim
Has long ago been swallowed,
But at your temples the lovely hollows
Play in June light. Suppose
There is one length left in you, knees flexed
Arms back. Chlorine, urine, raucous
Voices on shattered surface. If that boy topples
Counting Backwards Page 3