Out of the Blue (13 page)

Those shady girls on the green side of the street,

those far-from-green girls who keep to the shade,

those shady girls in mysterious suits

with their labels half-showing

as the cream flap of the jacket swings open,

those girls kicking aside the front-panelled pleats

of their cream suits with cerise lapels,

those on-coming girls,

those girls swinging pearly umbrellas

as tightly-sheathed as tulips in bud

from an unscrupulous street-seller,

those girls in cream and cerise suits

which mark if you touch them,

those girls with their one-name appointments

who walk out of the sunshine.

Do they wake careless and warm

with light on the unwashed windows

and a perpetual smell of bacon,

do their hearts sink at today’s martyr

with his unpronounceable name

and strange manner of execution?

Do they wake out of the darkness

with hearts thudding like ours

and reach for the souvenir lamp-switch

then shove a chair against the door

and key facts into the desk-top computer

while cold rattles along the corridor?

Do they cry out in sleep

at some barely-crushed thought,

some failure to see the joke,

or do they rest in their dreams

along the surface of the water

like a bevy of dragonflies

slack and blue in the shallows

whirring among reed-mace and water-forget-me-not

while the ripples cluck?

Do they wake in ordinary time

to green curtains slapping the frame

of a day that’ll cloud later on,

to cars nudging and growling for space,

to a baptismal mother, wan with her eagerness

and her sleepless, milk-sodden nights?

Do they reach and stroke the uneven plaster

and sniff the lime-blossom threading

like silk through the room,

or do they wait, stretched out like babies

in the gold of its being too early

with sun on their ceilings wobbling like jelly

while their housekeepers jingle the milk-bottles

and cry ‘Father!’ in sixty-year-old voices

and scorch toast with devotion –

do they sense the milk in the pan rising

then dive with their blue chins, blundering

through prayer under their honeycomb blankets?

Sisters leaving before the dance,

before the caller gets drunk

or the yellow streamers unreel

looping like ribbons

here and there on the hair of the dancers,

sisters at the turn of the stairs

as the sound system

one-twos, as the squeezebox

mewed in its case

is slapped into breath, and that scrape

of the tables shoved back for the dance

burns like the strike of a match

in the cup of two hands.

Ripe melons and meat

mix in the binbags with cake

puddled in cherry-slime, wind

heavy with tar

blows back the yard door, and I’m

caught with three drinks in my hands

on the stairs looking up

at the sisters leaving before the dance,

not wishing to push past them

in their white broderie anglaise and hemmed

skirts civilly drawn

to their sides to make room

for the big men in suits,

and the girls in cerise

dance-slippers and cross-backed dresses

who lead the way up

and take charge of the tickets, and yet

from their lips cantaloupe

fans as they speak

in bright quick murmurs between

a violin ghosting a tune

and the kids in the bar downstairs

begging for Coke, peaky but certain.

The sisters say their
good nights

and all the while people stay bunched

on the stairs going up, showing respect

for the small words of the ones leaving,

the ones who don’t stay for the dancing.

One sister twists a white candle

waxed in a nest of hydrangeas –

brick-red and uncommon, flowers

she really can’t want – she bruises the limp

warm petals with crisp fingers

and then poises her sandal

over the next non-slip stair

so the dance streams at her heels

in the light of a half-shut door.

You put your hand over mine and whispered

‘There he is, laying against the pebbles’ –

you wouldn’t point for the shadow

stirring the trout off his bed

where he sculled the down-running water,

and the fish lay there, unbruised

by the soft knuckling of the river-bed

or your stare which had found him out.

Last night I seemed to be walking

with something in my hand, earthward, down-

dropping as lead, unburnished –

a plate perhaps or a salver

with nothing on it or offered

but its own shineless composure.

I have it here on my palm, the weight

settled, spreading through bone

until my wrist tips backward, pulled down

as if my arm was laid in a current

of eel-dark water – that thrum

binding the fingers – arrow-like –

Rain. A plump splash

on tense, bare skin.

Rain. All the May leaves

run upward, shaking.

Rain. A first touch

at the nape of the neck.

Sharp drops kick the dust, white

downpours shudder

like curtains, rinsing

tight hairdos to innocence.

I love the privacy of rain,

the way it makes things happen

on verandahs, under canopies

or in the shelter of trees

as a door slams and a girl runs out

into the black-wet leaves.

By the brick wall an iris

sucks up the rain

like intricate food, its tongue

sherbetty, furred.

Rain. All the May leaves

run upward, shaking.

On the street bud-silt

covers the windscreens.

That lake lies along the shore

like a finger down my cheek,

its waters lull and collapse

dark as pomegranates,

the baby crawls on the straw

in the shadow-map of his father’s chair

while the priest talks things over

and light dodges across his hair.

There’s a lamp lit in the shed

and a fire on, and a man drinking

spiritus fortis he’s made for himself.

But on the floor of the barn

the dancing man is beginning to dance.

First a beat from the arch of his foot

as he stands upright, a neat

understatement of all that’s in him

and he lowers his eyes to her

as if it’s nothing, nothing –

but she has always wanted him.

Her baby crawls out from the chairs

and rolls in his striped vest laughing

under the feet of the dancers

so she must dance over him

toe to his cheek, heel to his hair,

as she melts to the man dancing.

They are talking and talking over there –

the priest sits with his back to her

for there’s no malice in him

and her husband glistens like the sun

through the cypress-flame of the man dancing

In the shed a blackbird

has left three eggs which might be kumquats –

they are so warm. One of them’s stirring –

who said she had deserted them?

In the orchard by the barn

there are three girls wading,

glossy, laughing at something,

they spin a bucket between them,

glowing, they are forgotten –

something else is about to happen.

The bathers, where are they? The sea is quite empty,

lapsed from its task of rinsing the white beach.

The promenade has a skein of walkers, four to the mile,

like beads threaded on the long Boulevard in front of the flowers.

Shutters are all back on the bankers’ fantasy houses,

but the air inside is glassy as swimming-pool water,

no one breathes there or silts it with movement,

Out of the kitchen a take-away steam rises:

the bankers are having sushi in honour of their guests

who are here, briefly, to buy ‘an impressionist picture’.

A boy is buried up to his neck in sand

but the youth leader stops another who pretends to piss on him.

The rest draw round, they have got something helpless:

his head laid back on its platter of curls.

With six digging, he’s out in a minute.

They oil his body with Ambre Solaire,

two boys lay him across their laps, a third

wipes at his feet then smiles up enchantingly.

I see the boys at the breakwater

straighten now, signalling friends,

and the little imperious one who is just not

dinted at the back of the arms

with child-like softness

sticks up his thumb to mark the next leap.

This far off it’s peaceful to watch them

while I’m walking ahead barefoot

on a wide, grey Norman promenade,

thinking of the Baron de Charlus

not in his wheelchair but younger,

bumbling into seduction in a hot courtyard,

tipped upside-down like a sand-timer,

labelled implacably – ‘the invert’

caught at the wide-striped

dawn years of the century

where the candy of skirts blows inward and outward

to a pure, bellying offshore wind.

The beautiful line of his coat ripples –

he’s Baron Hardup with dreams tupping

like pantomime horses – he fixes his eyeglass

and glares at the waves with passionate indecisiveness

as if to stop, or not stop, their irregular fall,

while the boys figure what he is good for.

After a night jagged by guard-dogs and nightingales

I sit to be videoed

at the corner of this carved balcony

where ten o’clock sun falls

past the curve of the Berlin Wall.

It’s nearly May Day.

Just here there’s a double wall –

a skin of concrete, a skin of stone

the colour of the Alsatians.

My feet shift on the slats.

I want to comb my hair straight.

I have my back

to a wood in the closed zone –

an orchard’s bright pelt

sparkling with blossom tips.

Bees fly in purposeful zigzags

over the Wall, tracing their map

of air and nectar.

Each day they fly through the spoors

of air-wiping floodlights now

sheathed in the watch-towers

to this one apple tree

which makes a garden of itself

under the balcony.

I have my back to the church.

Its roof glows in the gaps

where slate after slate’s peeled off.

I have my back to the porch

with its red lining of valerian,

its sound like a cough

as the doors squeeze themselves shut.

Katja unrolls cable

over the balcony rail.

A double wiring of roses

straddles the pews

in a hamlet which is the other half of here,

clear and suggestive as a mirror.

They say nobody lives there

but guards’ wives and children.

You rarely see them,

they melt into the woods like foxes

but you hear their motorbikes miles off

clutching the road surface.

You might hear the guards’ wives say

‘Let the kids have the grapes’

just as the nightingales insist

for hours when you can’t sleep.

This hamlet’s like something I’ve dreamed

in a dream broken by rain,

with its lilac and dull green

tenderly shifting leaves,

its woodpiles,

its watched inhabitants,

wives of the guards

who have between them a little son

in a too-tight yellow jersey

flashing along their own balcony.

He runs from his steep-roofed home

to scrabble onto his tricycle

and race with fat frantic legs pedalling

the few square metres marked by the wives

with a shield-square of clothes-line

where they’re forever hanging things out

while my back’s turned.

I study the guards’ underpants

and wish I still smoked

so I could blow smoke-rings

from the balcony of Jagdschloss Glienicke

past the flowering jaws of the apple tree

over complicated roof-shells

to the child himself.

I’d wave, holding the cigarette

cupped behind my back.

Any time they choose

people are changing Deutschmarks

for a tick on cheap paper,

a day-trip to the East

to buy Bulgarian church music

and butter at half-price,

to check their faces in a mirror

and get it all on video.

to walk through a map of mirrors

into the other half of here.

There’s mist on the Glienicke bridge.

The flags are limp.

There’s nothing flying at all –

not a flag, not an aeroplane

racing down safe corridors.

It’s nearly May Day.

A riot’s ripening in Kreuzberg.

If this is Spring, it’s going on elsewhere

grasping horse-chestnut buds

in sticky hands

warm and forgetful

as a child who buries himself

for joy in Pankow’s warm sands.

[September 1989]