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Counting Backwards

Page 15

by Helen Dunmore


  ‘I’ll hold you’

  and your voice like a bird’s in the grey morning

  came back ‘Hold you’,

  and your feet in my palm

  were barely hardened by walking,

  and then the scattering,

  the start of grammar

  and distance.

  You say, ‘Hold me.’

  You’ll say, ‘Don’t hold me.’

  All the things you are not yet

  (for Tess)

  Tonight there’s a crowd in my head:

  all the things you are not yet.

  You are words without paper, pages

  sighing in summer forests, gardens

  where builders stub out their rubble

  and plastic oozes its sweat.

  All the things you are, you are not yet.

  Not yet the lonely window in midwinter

  with the whine of tea on an empty stomach,

  not yet the heating you can’t afford and must wait for,

  tamping a coin in on each hour.

  Not the gorgeous shush of restaurant doors

  and their interiors, always so much smaller.

  Not the smell of the newsprint, the blur

  on your fingertips – your fame. Not yet

  the love you will have for Winter Pearmains

  and Chanel No.5 – and then your being unable

  to buy both washing-machine and computer

  when your baby’s due to be born,

  and my voice saying, ‘I’ll get you one’

  and you frowning, frowning

  at walls and surfaces which are not mine –

  all this, not yet. Give me your hand,

  that small one without a mark of work on it,

  the one that’s strange to the washing-up bowl

  and doesn’t know Fairy Liquid from whiskey.

  Not yet the moment of your arrival in taxis

  at daring destinations, or your being alone at stations

  with the skirts of your fashionable clothes flapping

  and no money for the telephone.

  Not yet the moment when I can give you nothing

  so well-folded it fits in an envelope –

  a dull letter you won’t reread.

  Not yet the moment of your assimilation

  in that river flowing westward: river of clothes,

  of dreams, an accent unlike my own

  saying to someone I don’t know: darling…

  Ferns on a hospital window

  From behind the curtain an open window

  fans the room with ferns of ice.

  In this institution

  health takes us by surprise.

  We are tuned to a different station.

  All night threads of cold make stars

  like cells dividing on glass.

  Behind me, monotonously,

  Charlotte roars. In tinfoil, shaking,

  they bring in another baby.

  Long ago the ferns died into coal.

  They give out their breath in sighs

  fanned into flame, in pandemonium

  hissing through pipes to this room

  where a baby burns in my arms.

  Diving girl

  She’s next to nowhere, feeling no cold

  in her white sluther of bubbles.

  She comes to a point like a seal

  in his deep dive, she is sleek.

  As her nostrils close

  she’s at home. See how salt water slides

  as she opens her eyes.

  There is the word naked

  but she’s not spelled by it.

  Look at her skin’s steel glint

  and the knife of her fins.

  With the basking shark

  with the minke whale

  and the grey seal

  she comes up to breathe

  ten miles offshore.

  A pretty shape

  I never stop listening to you sing

  long enough to know what I think.

  All I do is let it go on.

  The bubble of song bounces towards me

  over the wet surfaces of the kitchen

  and you with your arms folded

  in that tiny immemorial way you’ve observed,

  your soft, small arms folded

  over your chest where your breath

  flows and unflows easily,

  don’t need to look at me.

  The bubble of your song bounces towards me

  its surface tension strong

  as it shudders, recovers.

  You let the song go where it wants.

  When you’ve fallen asleep, or I think you’ve fallen

  I withdraw, still singing

  or perhaps still listening to you sing,

  but you feel me going. Why am I going

  always going, instead of listening to you sing?

  Your hand knows better than mine

  and with authority

  of touch I cannot match

  wraps me round you again.

  Viking cat in the dark

  Viking cat in the dark

  is paw-licked velvet, sinew of shadow,

  a thread of smoke bitterly burning,

  a quiver of black like a riddle.

  The huts lie low

  a hoard half-hidden

  a clutch of eggs

  in the dune’s hollow

  and horned helmets

  are nightmares to wake from

  shapes cut from dreams

  – but the cat leaps.

  Like rain falling faster

  the shadows whisper

  and rain spatters

  like death’s downpour:

  ‘Fight for me, dawn-slayer,

  wake with me, sleep-sower,

  keeper of dreams,

  the dream we came for.’

  There is no noise.

  Only the quick

  paws of the cat in the dark

  like feet on the stairs,

  but the cold grey hands of the sea clap

  on the beached long-ships,

  and a shape pours itself flat

  to the chink of sword music.

  Viking cat in the dark

  is paw-licked velvet, sinew of shadow.

  A thread of smoke, bitterly burning

  quivers her body like a riddle.

  Baby sleep

  ’s

  not like any other

  day sleep night sleep

  long drive sleep

  too cold too hot sleep

  What’s that window doing shut? sleep

  get a bit of peace sleep

  hungry thirsty

  need to pee

  sleep,

  baby sleep’s

  all over the shop sleep

  new nappy and babygro poppers

  done up to the neck sleep

  fat fingers

  starfishing

  damp feathers

  on neck curling

  baby lotion and talc sleep

  sleep in Mum and Dad’s bed sleep

  cry in sleep and then sleep sleep

  sleep while the big peop

  le wash and dress sleep

  baby sleep

  Frostbite

  When you grow tired of the flame

  wumping to life in the central heating boiler,

  and the duvet sweats like obstinate flesh

  in the middle of winter,

  don’t finger the lightswitch. Leave the coil

  of electricity sleeping. Go down

  tread after tread by the draught

  of heat coming upward. The voice

  of the house is warning. Get out

  it breathes, Leave us alone

  to our shuffling of dust-mites, our sorting

  of smell and shadow into home.

  First the bolt, then the chain, then the Chubb.

  You’re outside, but even in a nightdress

  that comes to the thighs, you
can’t rub the warmth off.

  Basketball player on Pentecost Monday

  With his hands he teaches wind to move –

  not this shuffle of leaves

  from rows of pollarded trees

  but the salt-laden, incoming

  breath of the Indies.

  He’s six foot seven,

  liquid in dull grey track suit,

  his trainers undone.

  There’s a small keen boy

  at his heels, yapping

  for ball-time, air-time.

  It’s playtime in the gardens

  with children sagely going round

  on patient horses they strike with small

  privileged hands.

  Behind him, gravelly sand,

  a guitarist picking

  the bones of a tune

  mournful as Sunday,

  the empty horses

  of carousels turning.

  Tell the basketball player how tight

  time is, how he’s reached perfection

  at the same time as the man with his rake

  puts the gravel straight on something.

  Tell him this is the moment

  the arrow of his life flew out of

  to return into his breastbone.

  Or say nothing.

  Tiger lookout

  Refrigerator days.

  Ours is the size of a walk-in larder,

  casing everything.

  One word

  which has gone out of fashion

  is putrefaction.

  When Simmonds fell from his tiger lookout

  it was not the growl

  nor the stripes

  that said tiger.

  It was the tiger’s breath.

  All that old, bad meat

  furring its teeth.

  For a moment Simmonds was critical,

  sniffing the exhalation of corpses,

  the walk-in larder where he was going.

  Tiger Moth caterpillar

  Two spines curve in

  as the sisters face on a gate

  in their matching cardigans.

  They are looking into something –

  a stolen Swan Vesta box

  plump with green privet,

  and there’s one match left

  with which to poke it –

  their marvellous possession.

  Inner thighs chafe on a crust of lichen.

  Riding the gate is the best game

  these two have ever come on.

  The more bloody a ballad

  they more they love it. Cigars,

  betrayal, the flames of hell

  and the slaughter of innocence

  are what speaks, makes the gate creak.

  Girls, give us a song

  in your tidy cardigans. Your hair’s

  deceptively sleek, you are

  tangled, complicit, in on it.

  Hungry Thames

  Hungry Thames, I walk over the bridge

  half-scared you’ll whittle me down

  where the brown water is eager

  and tipped with foam.

  You sigh and suck. You lick at the steps

  you would like to come up.

  Hungry Thames, we feed you on concrete,

  orange-peel, polystyrene cups,

  we hold our kids by a handful of clothing

  to let them look at your dimples,

  your smiling waters. We should hold them tighter,

  these are whirlpools, this is hunger

  lashing its tail in the mud, deep down

  where the river gets what it wants.

  The wasp

  Now winter comes and I am half-asleep

  crawling the hollow of an apple, my sound

  a battery toy in a child’s cupped hand,

  or I climb to a ledge and lie, dulled

  by its half-warmth. Half-wasp, I’m still

  helpless not to sting your exploring finger

  helpless in the pulse of my body.

  The paddle of your hand churns

  as you find something to kill me.

  I keep on stinging. I cannot learn

  through my crispness, the coat of warning

  that says what I am.

  On growing a black tulip

  I was in the kingdom of pointed raspberries,

  edible thistles, a green rose.

  Everything was true yet false

  like the yellow of whiteheart cherries.

  As the tulips yawned it was simple.

  The colour they call black is purple.

  The veins in it are loaded, lifting

  winter into a lamp of spring.

  My dream was a hedge of tulips,

  black tulips, glossy as swans

  sailing the river of their leaves.

  Next, golden delphiniums.

  Little Ellie and the timeshare salesman

  The man who gave little Ellie his forever

  love was a timeshare salesman.

  He let her look round the place

  when the carpet was freshly steam-cleaned

  and the teabag box was full to the brim,

  but he left little Ellie for an instant

  and she spied the used teabag jam-jar

  sodden and rusty as iron.

  Oh Ellie, whispered little Ellie,

  there have been many here before you.

  But she was smiling at the door

  when he gave her his hand, wet from the ballcock

  he’d quickly fixed in the cistern.

  In a serenade of gurgles and yawns

  the plumbing talked itself down

  and perfect Ellie was his dream.

  How could he replace or kill her

  with her genius for noticing nothing

  but the nice day, the short walk to the pool

  the view of the beach from the bathroom window?

  Sweet Ellie never crossed the time-share salesman,

  but tended her one week like a garden.

  She did not keep a diary where the others

  might be noted or brooded over.

  Kindly she watches him run on the wheel

  of his weeks till he gets back to nineteen

  where she is always happy to wait for him.

  Dusty geraniums come back to life

  in the days where Ellie waters them,

  and the time-share salesman slackens his smiles

  at the sight of Ellie’s daring paëlla:

  in week nineteen she is his forever.

  Bouncing boy

  (for Paul)

  All the squares of trampoline are taken

  by children leaping like chessmen

  who won’t play the game. Up, flying.

  from tiny freeholds, hitting the sky’s

  elastic surprise, then down.

  There’s a space for you always.

  Two kids eating ice-cream

  with careful darts of the tongue

  watch as you start to climb

  the icy November sky, hand over hand.

  You hear the clap of the sea

  and your bright blue trampoline applauding

  with the dull fervour of rubber

  each time you go down,

  and the kids eating ice-cream

  with wind in their teeth say nothing

  as the time mounts and your turn

  grows impossibly long.

  Ghost at noon

  On the white path at noon when the sun

  burns through olive and eucalyptus

  and the pale stones rattle

  as if someone’s walking,

  when the goat jumps and the sea shivers

  like a dog turning its belly upward

  to a hand that teases it,

  and the sky is cloudless but suddenly

  dark drops spatter the dust

  and there, where no one is walking,

  a line of wet footprints.

  Crickets crackle in the dry maquis,<
br />
  their sound unbroken.

  No one is walking.

  If you touch your finger to the dust, quickly,

  you’ll catch the pressure just gone.

  Greek beads

  Small, silvery, slipping

  from finger to finger,

  beads for street corners,

  beads for white noon

  when shadows curl by the walls

  and the dog in the square lolls

  with his tongue unfurled,

  beads for navy-blue evenings

  when the smell of oranges

  drifts to the fountain,

  beads for waiting on the landing-stage,

  for the heat that shimmers

  from village to village,

  for the boy guarding the goats

  and the old woman hoeing in black,

  beads for leaving to find work

  and for the dream of coming back,

  beads for remembering

  and for forgetting,

  wrapped round the wrists of babies

  and the dying,

  beads for the life we live in,

  small, silvery, slipping

  from finger to finger.

  Tea at Brandt’s

  Music plays gently. Yesterday’s morning paper

 

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