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Counting Backwards

Page 14

by Helen Dunmore


  bounce off the nails, they’ll say it’s no good

  and in their white clothes they’ll swarm

  all over the coffin-maker like angry ghosts.

  There’s no need for it to be like this.

  They could lend their tools to one another.

  They could watch each other’s little shrines

  in case the candle goes out. Instead they blow it out

  and sourly scour the insides of another cheap

  deal coffin for the common man.

  How many golden coffins can anyone want?

  Of those who appear at the alley-end,

  they prefer the advance buyers. It takes know-how

  to select a coffin for yourself.

  ‘In our family it’s cancer. Allow for shrinkage.’

  ‘Dropsy does us. Add it on to the width.’

  Can a man know the shape of the wood

  that will encase him? Can a woman

  close her eyes and breathe in the scent of cedar?

  These are the ones the coffin-makers like

  to sit with by the spirit-lamp. For these they bring out

  tea-plums, infuse Silver Needle

  and drink before they do the measuring.

  Time to compare wood-shavings,

  rubbing their curls between the fingers. Meanwhile

  man and wife from the flat upstairs

  take their blue bird for a walk

  to the evening park, still in its cage.

  Inside out

  Snug as a devil’s toenail embedded

  in blue liass, plastic

  in your movements as in dreams, you kick

  for headiness at the rich

  red walls that close on you like elastic.

  But now they’ve shucked you out, bare-naked

  in the devil’s kitchen, toes curled

  flinching from chip scraps, ash,

  lino sticky with beer tack,

  the nail-on-nylon scrape of the cold world.

  You are born, wed, dead, buried.

  The wooden walls of your coffin

  grip like hands, reassuring. You bang them

  for joy that they’ll bang back, booming

  that you’re hidden, hidden, hidden within.

  The blessing

  The halls are thronged, the grand staircase murmurous.

  There’s a smell of close-packed bodies, lilac,

  hair-gel and sweat. Handprints on the brass railings

  fade like breath on a cold window.

  Outside the city is stunned with snow.

  There he is, just where he should be

  by that leather-topped, deeply-scored table

  where fortunes are lost and made. He explains,

  and those at the back lean closer

  to catch the ripple of laughter.

  A joke, and the group dissolves

  to stare, study, and point a finger.

  He waits for them to catch up with him.

  You need a guide, with so many rooms

  and between them, so many turnings.

  I am there too, but not speaking.

  I wait while the paint peels,

  alone with the pulse of a Matisse

  and the sunlight beating full on us.

  But perhaps I say this

  as I see him hasten down another staircase:

  ‘You always had a blessing with you,

  and you still have a blessing with you.

  Keep moving. Go as fast as you can

  and whatever I say, don’t listen.’

  FROM

  Bestiary

  (1997)

  For Stephen Mollett

  and Stephanie Norgate

  …I was at home

  And should have been most happy, – but I saw

  Too far into the sea, where every maw

  The greater on the less feeds evermore. –

  But I saw too distinct into the core

  Of an eternal fierce destruction,

  And so from happiness I far was gone.

  Still am I sick of it, and tho’, to-day,

  I’ve gather’d young spring-leaves, and flowers gay

  Of periwinkle and wild strawberry,

  Still do I that most fierce destruction see, –

  The Shark at savage prey, – the Hawk at pounce, –

  The gentle Robin, like a Pard or Ounce,

  Ravening a worm…

  JOHN KEATS

  Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds

  Candle poem

  (after Sa‘di Yusuf)

  A candle for the ship’s breakfast

  eaten while moving southward

  through mild grey water

  with the work all done,

  a candle for the house seen from outside,

  the voices and shadows

  of the moment before coming home,

  a candle for the noise of aeroplanes

  going elsewhere, passing over,

  for delayed departures, embarrassed silences

  between people who love one another,

  a candle for sandwiches in service stations

  at four A.M., and the taste of coffee

  from plastic cups, thickened with sugar

  to keep us going,

  a candle for the crowd around a coffin

  and the terrible depth it has to fall

  into the grave dug for everyone,

  the deaths for decades to come,

  our deaths; a candle for going home

  and feeling hungry after saying

  we would never be able to eat the ham,

  the fruit cake, those carefully-buttered buns.

  At the Emporium

  He is the one you can count on

  for yesterday’s bread, rolling tobacco

  and the staccato

  tick of the blinds

  on leathery Wednesday afternoons.

  He has hand-chalked boards with the prices

  of Anchor butter and British wine.

  He doesn’t hold with half-day closing.

  He’s the king of long afternoons

  lounging vested in his doorway.

  He watches the children dwindle

  and dawdle, licking icepops

  that drip on the steps.

  His would be the last face that saw them

  before an abduction. Come in,

  he is always open.

  Next door

  is the same as ours, but different.

  Back to front stairs, and a bass that thuds

  like the music of demolition

  year after year, but the house

  is still standing.

  When we have parties they tense into silence,

  though they are good at fighting.

  After the last screech and slam, their children

  play war on their scab of a lawn.

  We are mirrors of one another,

  never showing what’s real.

  If I turn like this, quickly,

  and look over the fence, what will I see?

  He lived next door all his life

  One year he painted his front door yellow.

  It was the splash of a carrier bag

  in the dun terrace,

  but for the rest he was inconspicuous.

  He went out one way and came back the other,

  often carrying laundry and once compost

  for the tree he thought might do in the back yard.

  Some time later there was its skeleton

  taking up most of the bin.

  He passed the remark ‘It’s a pity’

  when it rained on a Saturday,

  and of a neighbour’s child he said ‘terror’.

  He picked his words like scones from a plate,

  dropping no crumbs. When his front door shut

  he was more gone than last Christmas.

  But for the girls stored in his cellar

  to learn what it meant

  to have no pity, to
be terror,

  he was there.

  Under the leaves

  How rangy they are, and lean, these leaves

  tasting and licking.

  These leaves are leaping

  the intersections of Crewe Junction

  on the back of the September wind

  shushing along the sidings.

  This is a place of rust, where murder

  spurts and dies down, where spikes

  of stilettos lodge in the points.

  Not pretty, not. What we saw

  when we opened the binbag was not

  a resurrection of leaves.

  This is a country of policemen, slowly tramping

  a line that doesn’t waver but vanishes

  in teatime mist. Here the search

  is begun, called off, resumed.

  The tack of rain falling on plastic

  will lead them home.

  The surgeon husband

  Here at my worktop, foil-wrapping a silver salmon

  – yes, a whole salmon – I’m thinking

  of the many bodies of women

  that my husband daily opens.

  Here he lunges at me in wellingtons.

  He is up to his armpits, a fisherman

  tugging against the strength of the current.

  I imagine the light for him, clean,

  and a green robing of willow

  and the fish hammering upstream.

  I too tug at the flaps of the salmon

  where its belly was, trying to straighten

  the silver seams before they are sewn.

  We are one in our dreams.

  The epidural is patchy, his assistant’s

  handwriting is slipping. At eleven fifteen

  they barb their patient to sleep, jot ‘knife to skin’,

  and the nurse smiles over her mask at the surgeon.

  But I am quietly dusting out the fish-kettle,

  and I have the salmon clean as a baby

  grinning at me from the table.

  Fishing beyond sunset

  The boy in the boat, the tip of the pole,

  slow swing of the boat as the wash goes round

  from other boats with lights on, heading home

  to islands, from islands: anyway they come.

  Thirty-four bass, small bass, not worth keeping.

  See them in the water, the hang

  of twice-caught fish playing dumb,

  then the shake-off of air. The kickdown

  always surprises you, makes your feet grip

  on the planks of the boat. There is the line

  disappearing into the sunset

  or so it seems, but it is plumbed

  by your finger, which sees nothing

  but a breeze of line running through water.

  Behind you a sheet of fire

  does something to pole, to boat, to boy.

  Hare in the snow

  Hare in the snow cresting

  the run of winter, stretching

  in liquid leaps over the hill,

  then the wind turns, and

  hare stands so still

  he is a freeze of himself, fooling

  the shadows into believing

  he is one of them.

  Need

  (a version from Piers Plowman: ‘The Pardon sent from Truth’)

  I know that no one dare judge another’s need,

  for need is our neighbour, blood to our bone:

  the prisoner in Long Lartin, the poor of shantytown

  bearing children, burdened by bad landlords,

  struggling to scrape together what goes straight out

  on rent, on never enough food for the children

  who cry like crickets from hunger, night-long.

  They slave while they’re sick with hunger,

  wake in the damp of winter, crouch between wall and cradle

  to rock the crying baby, their raw fingers

  chapped with outworking, seaming denim

  for half nothing, pitiful labour paid by the hour

  which takes them nowhere, only to one more

  half-hour’s heat on the meter, scraping and struggling,

  working for nothing.

  The misery of women in run-down hostels

  the misery of the men crammed in with them

  racked by the nothing that is all they have,

  too proud to beg, to show they are slowly starving

  withering away, their poverty hidden like AIDS,

  a shame that must never be shown to their neighbours

  a shame that has made strangers of neighbours

  and hunger the only guest at all their meals.

  The world has kicked into me the future

  of children born into poverty’s welcome

  to parents who have nothing but surplus labour,

  empty hands, thoughts nobody wants.

  Chips are their Sunday roast, dog-ends rolled up in Rizlas

  damp down the parents’ hunger as they look on

  while the kids eat baked beans and bacon.

  By the State’s cold calculation

  they could get by on carrots and bakers’ leavings.

  Only love can help them.

  These will not beg, but there are beggars

  who shoot up everything they’re given

  who have nothing at all wrong with them

  who could perfectly well do a day’s work

  who deserve no pity, no money, nothing.

  Even if they collapse on the streets, coughing

  from the come-back of ancient diseases

  think nothing of it. Don’t be ashamed to walk past

  with your wallet stuffed with credit cards

  as the Bible says.

  But yet. Look again. What about these beggars

  who look perfectly all right, able to do a day’s work,

  ought to be cleared off the streets – all that? And yet

  some of them come from another world, or another time.

  Care in the community is the cold calculation

  that takes care of them. Stop. Look again.

  They live by the phases of the moon

  by an inner fire that will not leave them alone.

  They are penniless as time and tide, wander with nothing

  like the holy apostles, Peter and Paul.

  They have no time for preaching or miracles

  but they can speak in tongues if you listen,

  and catch the wind of truth in the sails

  of what seems like play.

  God who can do anything

  might have made them businessmen,

  but instead he made them his own children

  and sent them out with empty bank accounts

  holey jeans and a blanket to wrap around them.

  These secret disciples break all the rules but his,

  the one rule that tells us to love, and give.

  Think. You will even put up with poets

  for the sake of their patrons, if these are rich men,

  publishers who fancy culture, and keep a newspaper.

  Think of the Lord of heaven who has sent his children

  to be called madmen, and please him

  if you can, by throwing some cash at them.

  And think again. When you are begging

  for God’s pardon, when the daylight after death

  shines on your sins, think of them,

  God’s secret children, born pardoned,

  and what you did for them.

  Sometimes in the rough garden of city spaces

  Sometimes in the rough garden of city spaces

  where I believe a mugger will not approach me

  because so far no mugger has approached me

  I stop to take breath.

  The city exists by acts of faith

  that we and our children are safe,

  that the pounding wheels of cars will miss them,

  that the traffic will s
top when the lights turn,

  that parks will stay green, that money is not everything,

  that the lime trees that line our streets are lopped and cropped

  with the best of intentions,

  that the orange glow of the streetlamps is moonlight

  to that couple there, locked in each other, lost

  in the city’s night-time suspension.

  I should like to be buried in a summer forest

  I should like to be buried in a summer forest

  where people go in July,

  only a bus ride from the city,

  I should like them to walk over me

  not noticing anything but sunlight

  and patches of wild strawberries –

  Here! Look under the leaves!

  I should like the child who is slowest

  to end up picking the most,

  and the big kids will show the little

  the only way to grasp a nettle

  and pick it so it doesn’t sting.

  I should like home-time to come

  so late the bus has its lights on

  and a cloud of moths hangs in their beam,

  and when they are all gone

  I should like to be buried in a summer forest

  where the dark steps

  blindfold, on cat foot-pads,

  with the dawn almost touching it.

  The scattering

  First, the echo

  at night, when I said

 

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