Counting Backwards
Page 22
torques and amulets in their burial place.
The seals quiver, backstroking
for pure joy of it, down to the tidal
slim mouth of the loch,
they draw their lips back, their blunt whiskers
tingle at the inspout of salt water
then broaching the current they roll
off between islands and circles of oarweed.
At noon the sea-farmer
turns back his blanket of weed
and picks up potatoes like eggs
from their fly-swarming nest,
too fine for the sacks, so he puts them in boxes
and once there they smell earthy.
At noon the seals nose up the rocks
to pile there, sun-dazed,
back against belly, island on island.
and sleep, shivering like dogs
against the tug of the stream
flowing on south past Campbelltown.
The man’s hands rummage about still
to find what is full-grown there.
Masts on the opposite shore ring faintly
disturbing themselves, and make him look up.
Hands down and still moving
he works on, his fingers at play blinded,
his gaze roving the ripe sea-loch.
Wild strawberries
What I get I bring home to you:
a dark handful, sweet-edged,
dissolving in one mouthful.
I bother to bring them for you
though they’re so quickly over,
pulpless, sliding to juice,
a grainy rub on the tongue
and the taste’s gone. If you remember
we were in the woods at wild strawberry time
and I was making a basket of dockleaves
to hold what you’d picked,
but the cold leaves unplaited themselves
and slid apart, and again unplaited themselves
until I gave up and ate wild strawberries
out of your hands for sweetness.
I lipped at your palm –
the little salt edge there,
the tang of money you’d handled.
As we stayed in the wood, hidden,
we heard the sound system below us
calling the winners at Chepstow,
faint as the breeze turned.
The sun came out on us, the shade blotches
went hazel: we heard names
bubble like stock-doves over the woods
as jockeys in stained silks gentled
those sweat-dark, shuddering horses
down to the walk.
A mortgage on a pear tree
A pear tree stands in its own maze.
It does not close its blossom all night
but holds out branchfuls of cool
wide-open flowers. Its slim leaves look black
and stir like tongues in the lamp-light.
It was here before the houses were built.
The owner grew wasteland and waited for values to rise.
The builders swerved a boundary sideways
to cup the tree in a garden. When they piled rubble
it was a soft cairn mounting the bole.
The first owner of the raw garden
came out and walked on the clay clods.
There was the pear tree, bent down
with small blunt fruits, each wide where the flower was,
shaped like a medlar, but sweet.
The ground was dense with fermenting pears,
half trodden to pulp, half eaten.
She could not walk without slipping.
Slowly she walked in her own maze,
sleepy, feeling the blood seep
down her cold fingers, down the spread branch
of veins which trails to the heart,
and remembered how she’d stood under a tree
holding out arms, with two school-friends.
It was the fainting-game,
played in the dinner-hour from pure boredom,
never recalled since. For years this was growing
to meet her, and now she’s signed for her own
long mortgage over the pear tree
and is the gainer of its accrued beauty,
but when she goes into her bedroom
and draws her curtains against a spring night
the pear tree does not close its white blossom.
The flowers stay open with slim leaves flickering around them:
touched and used, they bear fruit.
A pæony truss on Sussex Place
Restless, the pæony truss tosses about
in a destructive spring wind.
Already its inner petals are white
without one moment of sun-warmed expansion.
The whole bunch of the thing looks poor
as a stout bare-legged woman in November
slopping her mules over the post office step
to cash a slip of her order book.
The wind rips round the announced site
for inner city conversion: this is the last tough
bit of the garden, with one lilac
half sheared-off and half blooming.
The AIDS ad is defaced and the Australian
lager-bright billboard smirks down
on wind-shrivelled passersby who stayed put
to vote in the third Thatcher election.
The porch of the Elim Pentecostal Church brightens
as a woman in crimson and white suit
steps out, pins her hat down
then grasps the hands of her wind-tugged grandchildren.
Permafrost
For all frozen things –
my middle finger that whitens
from its old, ten-minute frostbite,
for black, slimy potatoes
left in the clamp,
for darkness and cold like cloths
over the cage,
for permafrost, lichen crusts
nuzzled by reindeer,
the tender balance of decades
null as a vault.
For all frozen things –
the princess and princes
staring out of their bunker
at the original wind,
for NATO survivors in nuclear moonsuits
whirled from continent to continent
like Okies in bumpy Fords
fleeing the dustbowl.
For all frozen things –
snowdrops and Christmas roses
blasted down to the germ
of their genetic zip-code.
They fly by memory –
cargo of endless winter,
clods of celeriac, chipped
turnips, lanterns at ten A.M.
in the gloom of a Finnish market lace;
flowers under glass, herring,
little wizened apples.
For all frozen things –
the nipped fish in a mess of ice,
the uncovered galleon
tossed from four centuries of memory,
or nuclear snowsuits bouncing on dust,
trapped on the rough ride of the earth’s surface,
on the rough swing of its axis,
like moon-men lost on the moon
watching the earth’s green flush
tremble and perish.
At Cabourg
Later my stepson will uncover a five-inch live shell
from a silted pool on the beach at St Côme. It is complete
with brass cap and a date on it: nineteen forty-three.
We’ll look it up in the dictionary, take it
to show at the Musée de la Libération
– ce petit obus – but once they unwrap it
they’ll drop the polite questions and scramble
full tilt for the Gendarmerie opposite.
The gendarmes will peer through its cradle of polythene
gingerly, laughing. One’s at the phone
we’ve got a live shell here in the Poste!’
Of course this will have happened before.
They’ll have it exploded, there’ll be no souvenir shell-case,
and we’ll be left with our photographs
taken with a camera which turns out to be broken.
Later we’ll be at the Château Fontaine-Henry
watching sleek daughters in jodhpurs come in from the fields.
I’ll lie back in my green corduroy coat, and leave,
faint, to drive off through fields of sunflowers
without visiting the rooms we’ve paid for.
Madame will have her fausse-couche,
her intravenous injections, her glass ampoules,
in a room which is all bed
and smells of medicinal alcohol and fruit.
The children will play on the beach, a little forlornly,
in the wind which gusts up out of nowhere.
Later we’ll see our friends on their lightweight bicycles
freewheeling tiredly downhill to Asnelles.
Their little son, propped up behind them
will glide past, silent, though he alone sees us.
But now we are on the beach at Cabourg,
stopped on our walk to look where the sky’s whitening
over the sea beyond Dives. Now a child squawks
and races back as a wave slaps over his shorts’ hem
to where a tanned woman with naked breasts
fidgets her baby’s feet in the foam
straight down from the Boulevard Marcel Proust.
Ploughing the roughlands
It’s not the four-wheeled drive crawler
spitting up dew and herbs,
not Dalapon followed by dressings
of dense phosphates,
nor ryegrass greening behind wire as behind glass,
not labourers wading in moonsuits
through mud gelded by paraquat –
but now, the sun-yellow, sky-blue
vehicles mount the pale chalk,
the sky bowls on the white hoops
and white breast of the roughland,
the farmer with Dutch eyes
guides forward the quick plough.
Now, flush after flush of Italian ryegrass
furs up the roughland
with its attentive, bright,
levelled-off growth –
pale monoculture
sweating off rivers of filth
fenced by the primary
colours of crawler and silo.
The land pensions
The land pensions, like rockets
shoot off from wheat with a soft yellow
flame-bulb: a rook or a man in black
flaps upwards with white messages.
On international mountains and spot markets
little commas of wheat translate.
The stony ground’s pumped to a dense fire
by the flame-throwing of chemicals.
On stony ground the wheat can ignite
its long furls.
The soft rocket of land pensions flies
and is seen in Japan, covering
conical hills with its tender stars:
now it is firework time, remembrance
and melt-down of autumn chrysanthemums.
On bruised fields above Brighton
grey mould laces the wheat harvest.
The little rockets are black. Land pensions
fasten on silos elsewhere, far off.
Market men flicker and skulk like eels
half-way across earth to breed.
On thin chipped flint-and-bone land
a nitrate river laces the grey wheat
pensioning off chalk acres.
A dream of wool
Decoding a night’s dreams
of sheepless uplands
the wool-merchant clings to the wool churches,
to trade with the Low Countries,
to profitable, downcast
ladies swathed in wool sleeves
whose plump, light-suffused faces
gaze from the triptychs he worships.
Sheep ticks, maggoty tails and foot-rot
enter his tally of dense beasts, walking
with a winter’s weight on their backs
through stubborn pasture
they graze to a hairsbreadth.
From the turf of the Fire Hills
the wool-merchant trawls
sheep for the marsh markets.
They fill mist with their thin cries –
circular eddies, bemusing
the buyers of mutton
from sheep too wretched to fleece.
In the right angle of morning sunshine
the aerial photographer
shoots from the blue,
decodes a landscape
of sheepless uplands
and ploughed drove roads,
decodes the airstream, the lapis lazuli
coat for many compacted skeletons
seaming the chalk by the sea.
New crops
O engines
flying over the light, barren
as shuttles, thrown over a huge
woof
crossply
of hedgeless snail tracks,
you are so high,
you’ve felled the damp crevices
you’ve felled the boulder-strewn meadow
the lichen
the strong plum tree.
O engines
swaying your rubber batons
on pods, on ripe lupins,
on a chameleon terrace
of greenlessness,
you’re withdrawn from a sea
of harvests, you’re the foreshore
of soaked soil leaching
undrinkable streams.
Shadows of my mother against a wall
The wood-pigeon rolls soft notes off its breast
in a tree which grows by a fence.
The smell of creosote,
easy as wild gum
oozing from tree boles
keeps me awake. A thunderstorm
heckles the air.
I step into a bedroom
pungent with child’s sleep,
and lift the potty and pile of picture books
so my large shadow
crosses his eyes.
Sometimes at night, expectant,
I think I see the shadow of my mother
bridge a small house of enormous rooms.
Here are white, palpable walls
and stories of my grandmother:
the old hours of tenderness I missed.
Air layering
The rain was falling down in slow pulses
between the horse-chestnuts, as if it would set root there.
It was a slate-grey May evening
luminous with new leaves.
I was at a talk on the appearances of Our Lady
these past five years at Medjugorje.
We sat in a small room in the Presbytery:
the flow of the video scratched, the raindrop
brimmed its meniscus upon the window
from slant runnel to sill.
Later I watched a programme on air layering.
The round rootball steadied itself
high as a chaffinch nest, and then deftly
the gardener severed the new plant.
She knew its wounded stem would have made roots there.
The argument
It was too hot, that was the argument.
I had to walk a mile with my feet flaming
from brown sandals and sun.
Now the draggling shade of the privet made me to dawdle,
now soft tarmac had to be crossed.
I was lugging an old school-bag –
it was so hot the world was agape with it.
One limp rose fell as I pa
ssed.
An old witch sat in her front garden
under the spokes of a black umbrella
lashed to her kitchen chair.
God was in my feet as I fled past her.
Everyone I knew was so far away.
The yellow glob of my ice cream melted and spread.
I bought it with huge pennies, held up.
‘A big one this time!’ the man said,
so I ate on though it cloyed me.
It was for fetching the bread
one endless morning before Bank Holiday.
I was too young, that was the argument,
and had to propitiate everyone:
the man with the stroke, and the burnt lady
whose bared, magical teeth made me
smile if I could –
Oh the cowardice of my childhood!
The peach house
The dry glasshouse is almost empty.
A few pungent geraniums with lost markings
lean in their pots.
It is nothing but a cropping place for sun
on cold Northumbrian July days.