Counting Backwards

by Helen Dunmore

  You too will go down.

  February 12th 1994

  No one else remembers that room

  With the blood pressure cuff and the plastic cot

  And the bag on its stand dripping

  Millilitre by millilitre

  When the visitors had gone home

  And the tyres six storeys down

  Skidded, infrequent.

  Snow on the window ticked

  The glass, becoming sleet

  And the sheets for all their stains were white.

  No one else remembers that room

  Where you cried each time the lights

  Went off and the nurses were absent

  For hours by morphia time,

  I reached for you in pain

  And lifted you in your hospital nightgown

  To wedge you against me

  For we were both falling

  You with purple, dangling limbs

  Ecstatic, all lips

  And quick, hot breathing,

  I watching a nurse who did not exist

  Write her hieroglyphics

  As the snow thickened.

  I made a vow to you then

  In our solitude

  That you would never remember,

  With two fingers I smoothed the ruck

  Of the gown against your back.

  What shall I do for my sister in the day she shall be spoken for?

  I have a little sister, she has no breasts.

  I buy her face covering at the shop

  Where they have nearly run out.

  So, we are lucky. Black cloth sucks

  Into her nostrils. My sister screams.

  When she’s finished saying she can’t breathe

  When I’ve cleaned the snot from her face

  And rearranged her so she’ll be safe

  I say: It’s for your own good.

  Do as I do and walk close.

  I have a little sister, she has no breasts.

  She would like to be an ophthalmologist.

  When she was three she had a cyst

  Removed from under her left eyelid.

  I say: Don’t cry, you can still see out.

  I tell her to walk between me and the wall

  And keep her eyes downward. We scuttle

  Like crabs in a black wrapping.

  We shall buy rice, we shall go home.

  What shall I do for my sister

  In the day when she shall be spoken for?

  In Secret

  And this is where they met in secret.

  Follow my pointing finger. Now you see it

  Quite empty. Those curtains that veiled it

  Are rags, and the bed stripped bare.

  Here she played for him, there

  He placed his shoes in the corner.

  Piano from an upstairs room,

  Wanton extravagance of scales falling

  As we imagine birdsong –

  But only slow it down

  And hear the gong-repeat of a rhythm

  Like the treading of rubble over a woman.

  All the breaths of your life

  There is a gargoyle look when the mouth caves.

  No more words can be hoped for, the lips

  Are not for speaking, the tongue

  Is all sag and distortion.

  I might think that your kindness is effaced.

  No more look can be hoped for, your eyes

  Are not for seeing, the skin

  Is a drawn curtain over them.

  I hear your breath, now failing

  As all the breaths of your life become

  Petals endlessly opening

  Inward, where the dark is.

  Her children look for her

  Life and death are in the hands of God she said

  As a boat is in the hands of the dark water,

  And now her children look for her

  In the zizz of her sewing-machine each evening

  And the smell of cardamom.

  She said: life and death are in the hands of God.

  As the sun beat on the roof of the van

  She closed her eyes to dream,

  And her children look as the Pole Star goes up

  Close to the moon.

  Little papoose

  If I were the moon

  With a star papoose

  In the windy sky

  I’d carry my one star home,

  If I were the sea

  With boats in my arms

  On this cold morning

  I’d carry them,

  If I were sleeping

  And my dream turned

  I would carry you

  Little papoose

  Wherever you choose.

  Cliffs of Fall

  (to the memory of Gerard Manley Hopkins)

  Spring of turf and thrift, tangle of fleece, sheep-shit,

  Subtle flowers where honeybees knock

  At the foxglove lip and the gorse trap

  Then sheer on our left the drop. Spatter of bracken hooks

  Misleading the lambs. In the bank, marsh violets

  Wet, lovely, minute. We need not look for the fall, the chink

  Of pebble that tumbles. All the grey scree stirs

  Slip-rattles and stills itself. Here is the slope’s

  Angle, implacable. Here’s where you look

  Touch, unbalance, dislodge. Infinite drop

  Where the bee burrs at the foxglove’s lip,

  All quick-tongued, intimate.

  Time to step back to the wide margin

  Cleave to the path’s dapper attention

  Unspring each poem,

  Pitch each new note to the key of loss,

  Lose nothing. Stay clear of the drop

  Where the world bursts through its dirty glass.

  Sun on your neck, a dazzle of violets

  Infinitely slipsliding –

  No quick wing-beat of flight, but a slope

  Of gravel-rubble, its angle implacable

  stripping you raw. From here your fall

  Is a matter of form: a slow marvel.

  Five Versions from Catullus

  1 Through Babel of Nations

  Through babel of nations and waste of water

  I come my brother. What are these rites to us?

  Your ashes are speechless

  My words falter.

  Blind fate has taken you, brother,

  You and I are undone.

  The wine I bring you is spoiled

  With the salt of parting –

  What else can I give?

  Only a last greeting.

  2 Undone

  What you have done to me has undone me.

  You have led me so far from myself

  That my mind loses its bearings.

  Even if you shape-shifted

  To your best and dearest

  I couldn’t care for it. Dark love drives me on.

  3 Sirmio

  Almost island and jewel of all islands

  In lakes stiller than thought or in wild oceans

  Sweet or salt as the sea-god makes them,

  Sirmio,

  I see you, all of you, I take you in

  I see you, barely believing

  I’ve left those featureless, endless Bithynian plains.

  We travel over many waters

  To reach home-coming,

  Struggle and suffering over, the mind dissolved

  Of all its troubles, burdens laid down –

  The soft bed waits for our exhaustion.

  I see you, all of you, I know your

  Confusion of ripples against the lakeshore

  Welcoming laughter

  The sounds of home

  Ringing like masts in harbour:

  Sirmio.

  4 Dedication

  My slim volume, polished almost to nothing –

  Shall I dedicate it to you, Cornelius?

  You thought something of my songs

  Even th
ough you were the only man in Italy

  Who could wrap up the world in three tomes

  Of flawless erudition.

  My God, your learning and labour

  Lean heavily against my little volume,

  So take my book, this fingernail’s width

  For what it’s worth.

  5 Sparrow

  Sparrow, my girl’s delight

  And plaything held to her breast,

  Sparrow whom she teases with one finger

  Daring your littleness to peck harder –

  Sparrow, I burn for her

  And crave the smallest crumb

  As the pair of you play

  Folded together in rapture

  Under one wing.

  I too long to comfort her

  In grief or oppressive longing –

  If only I could play with her as you do

  Until she forgets her soul’s sadness.

  Rim

  Here is the bowl. Do I want it still

  Chipped as it is and crazed,

  Its lustrous cream no longer running

  Over the body in fleet glaze,

  I’m getting rid, getting shot, cleansing

  Dark cupboards and fossil-deep

  Drawers lined with historic newspaper.

  I stop to read about the three-day-week.

  Here are gewgaws with tarnished clasps

  Here is the gravy-boat, the one item

  Surviving from the wedding service.

  Here’s Ted Heath’s improbable grin.

  I flick the rim and it gives back a tang –

  Yes, I remember that, the exact sound

  Of early curiosity and boredom.

  Bowl on my palm, I twist it round

  And round again, unsure.

  Do I hold or let it fall?

  On looking through the handle of a cup

  On looking through the handle of a cup

  I spied a nest of green: the spout

  Minus the can, a bunch of leaves

  Big as my hand: two trees

  In the palm of the wind,

  On looking through the hole made by a pin

  In a plane leaf twirled

  All ways to catch the world

  I saw a drop of rain, swollen

  On the petal of a rose,

  On looking through the fault in my eyes

  With their arrhythmias of vision

  I saw what no one has seen:

  My cup-handle of a world,

  My pinhole morning.

  Ten Books

  Jacketless, buckled, pressed from the voyage,

  Ten books that once were crated to America

  And back again,

  That have known the salt sea’s swing under them,

  Oil stink, the deep throb of the engines

  And quick hands putting them back on the shelves.

  Spines torn, the paper wartime, the Faber

  Font squarish and the dates in Roman:

  The Waste Land and other poems,

  Poems Newly Selected, Siegfried Sassoon –

  How that name conjured with me

  As a soldier kicked at a dead man.

  MacNeice, freckled with brown

  From many damps in many different houses.

  On the inner page, under my father’s autograph

  An early flourish of blue crayon

  Where I scribbled a figure so primitive

  There are not even legs for it to walk upon.

  Bowed, chipped, darkening, edge-worn

  Sunned, loose, fading

  Binding copy, reading copy, shaken:

  Ten books that I have taken.

  From the balcony on an August morning

  I see the rest fly to the tip lorry

  Where the sofa for a moment reposes

  Legs in the air, grinning.

  It is soaked through with music

  But nothing will save it.

  Behind it the sea makes the usual silveriness,

  The café opens and the bikes whizz

  From end to end of the promenade.

  Meanwhile in my father’s hand, a quotation

  On the title page of Herbert Read’s

  Thirty-Five Poems: ‘I absorbed Blake,

  His strange beauty, his profound message,

  His miraculous technique, and to emulate

  Blake was to be my ambition

  And my despair…’ (Faber and Faber,

  24 Russell Square.) I see my own hands

  Smooth and small as they are not now

  Lifting, turning, ‘I am amazed

  To find how much I owe to him.’

  Subtraction

  You always thought that you’d die mid-stride,

  Sun on your left hand, darkness

  Crossing you out in one swipe.

  When you got on to subtraction

  It was easy-peasy. Add one

  At the top, take one from the next column.

  Good at take-away, good at adding,

  Revving up for the 11-plus

  But no mathematician,

  You stumbled upon infinity

  With infinite terror, and knew

  The limits of divinity –

  What you’d been told was wrong.

  If all you loved had been given

  Then all could be taken.

  You knew then that you must blot

  In the blue notebook, trim

  With happy pencil, the sum

  Of what is when it is not.

  My people

  My people are the dying,

  I am of their company

  And they are mine,

  We wake in the wan hour

  Between three and four,

  Listen to the rain

  And consider our painkillers.

  I lie here in the warm

  With four pillows, a light

  And the comfort of my phone

  On which I sometimes compose,

  And the words come easily

  Bubbling like notes

  From a bird that thinks it is dawn.

  My people are the dying.

  I reach out to them,

  A company of suffering.

  One falls by the roadside

  And a boot stamps on him,

  One lies in her cell, alone,

  Without tenderness

  Brutally handled

  Towards her execution.

  I can do nothing.

  This is my vigil: the lit candle,

  The pain, the breath of my people

  Drawn in pain.

  September Rain

  Always rain, September rain,

  The slipstream of the season,

  Night of the equinox, the change.

  There are three surfers out back.

  Now the rain’s pulse is doubled, the wave

  Is not to be caught. Are they lost in the dark

  Do they know where the coast is combed with light

  Or is there only the swell, lifting

  Back to the beginning

  When they ran down the hill like children

  Through this rain, September rain,

  And the sea opened its breast to them?

  I lie and listen

  And the life in me stirs like a tide

  That knows when it must be gone.

  I am on the deep deep water

  Lightly held by one ankle

  Out of my depth, waiting.

  Hold out your arms

  Death, hold out your arms for me

  Embrace me

  Give me your motherly caress,

  Through all this suffering

  You have not forgotten me.

  You are the bearded iris that bakes its rhizomes

  Beside the wall,

  Your scent flushes with loveliness,

  Sherbet, pure iris

  Lovely and intricate.

  I am the child who stands by the wall

  Not much taller than the iris. />
  The sun covers me

  The day waits for me

  In my funny dress.

  Death, you heap into my arms

  A basket of unripe damsons

  Red crisscross straps that button behind me.

  I don’t know about school,

  My knowledge is for papery bud covers

  Tall stems and brown

  Bees touching here and there, delicately

  Before a swerve to the sun.

  Death stoops over me

  Her long skirts slide,

  She knows I am shy.

  Even the puffed sleeves on my white blouse

  Embarrass me,

  She will pick me up and hold me

  So no one can see me,

  I will scrub my hair into hers.

  There, the iris increases

  Note by note

  As the wall gives back heat.

  Death, there’s no need to ask:

  A mother will always lift a child

  As a rhizome

  Must lift up a flower

  So you settle me

  My arms twining,

  Thighs gripping your hips

  Where the swell of you is.

  As you push back my hair

  – Which could do with a comb