Out of the Blue (14 page)

Three workmen with blue pails

swerve past an election poster

wrapped round a lamp-post pillar,

signed with a single carnation

and a name for each ward.

The workmen guffaw –

it’s five past three on a small street

which traipses off Unter den Linden

deep into East Berlin.

Short, compact and bored

they tramp over the slats

where the pavement’s torn up.

One of them’s telling a joke.

They swing on under a banner

for a play by Harold Pinter –

stretched linen, four metres wide

and at least two workmen tall,

spread on a ten-metre wall –

the play’s
The Dumb Waiter
.

They go on past a kindergarten

which is tipping out children,

past banks with bullet-holes in them,

past an industrial shoal

of tower-block homes

to the second-right turn

where the pulse of street-life picks up,

where there are people and shops.

Ahead, a queue forms

as a café rattles itself open

and starts to serve out ice cream.

Inside his treacle-brown frame

a young man flickers and smiles

as he fans out the biscuit-shells –

already half the ice cream’s gone

and the waiter teases the children

with cold smoke from a new can.

Seeds stick to their tongues –

gooseberry, cloudberry – chill,

grainy and natural.

Shoving their caps back

the workmen join on

and move forward in line

for what’s over. Tapping light coins

they move at a diagonal

to a blue, skew-whiff ditched Trabbi.

The room creaked like a pair of lungs

and the fire wouldn’t go

till we held up the front page for it.

All the while the news was on

that day they wired up the Wall

while I was swimming on newspaper –

a cold rustle of words

to the wheezing of my sister.

I caught the fringe of her scarf

in winter smogs after school

as she towed me through the stutter

of high-lamped Ford Populars

and down the mouth of the railway tunnel

into water-pocked walls

and the dense sulphurous hollows

of nowhere in particular.

It was empty but for smog.

Coughing through our handkerchiefs

we walked eerily, lammed

at the brickwork, picked ourselves up.

I walked through nowhere last April

into a mist of brown coal,

sulphur emissions, diesel

stopped dead at the Wall,

the whiff of dun Trabants

puttering north/south

past a maze of roadworks,

leaving hours for us to cross

in the slow luxury of strolling

as the streets knit themselves up

to become a city again.

By instinct I kept my mouth shut

and breathed like one of us girls

in our “identical-twin” coats,

listening out for rare cars,

coal at the back of our throats –

it was England in the fifties,

half-blind with keeping us warm,

so I was completely at ease

in a small street off Unter Den Linden

as a fire-door behind wheezed

and Berlin creaked like two lungs.

Your dry voice from the centre of the bed

asks ‘Is it safe?’

and I answer for the days as if I owned them.

Practised at counting, I rock

the two halves of the month like a cradle.

The days slip over their stile

and expect nothing. They are just days,

and we’re at it again, thwarting

souls from the bodies they crave.

They’d love to get into this room

under the yellow counterpane

we’ve torn to make a child’s cuddly,

they’d love to slide into the sheets

between soft, much-washed

flannelette fleece,

they’d love to be here in the moulded spaces

between us, where there is no room,

but we don’t let them. They fly about gustily,

noisy as our own children.

Big barbershop man turning away,

sides of his face

lathered and shaved

close with the cut-throat

he always uses,

big barbershop man turning away,

helping the neighbours

make good, sweating

inside a stretched t-shirt

with
NO MEANS YES
on the back of it,

waltzing a side of pig,

taking the weight,

scalp like a glove

rucked with the strain,

big barbershop man turning away

trim inside like a slice of ham

big barbershop man

hoisting the forequarter,

fat marbled with meat

stiff as a wardrobe,

big barbershop man

waltzing a side of pig

striped like a piece

of sun awning, cool

as a jelly roll,

big barbershop man waltzing the meat

like a barber’s pole on yellow Main Street.

It was not always a dry well.

Once it had been brimming with water.

cool, limpid, delicious water,

but a man came and took water from the well

and a woman came and took water from the well

and a man took water from the well again

                 and the well could not drink

                 from the low, slack water-table.

The well lacked a sense of its own danger

and a man came to take water from the well

and a woman came to take water from the well

                 but as the man was coming again

                 the well sighed in the dry darkness,

                 the well spoke in a quiet voice

                 from the deep-down bell of its emptiness

                
Give me some water
.

But the man was at work with his heavy bucket

and he cried cheerfully,
Wait half a minute,

I will just draw one more bucketful!

When he swung it up it was full of dust

and he was angry with the well.

Could it not have held out longer?

He had only needed one more bucketful.

It’s evening on the river,

steady, milk-warm,

the nettles head-down

with feasting caterpillars,

the current turning,

thin as a blade-bone.

Reed-mace shivers.

I’m miles from anywhere.

Who’s looking?

did a fish jump?

– and then a heron goes up

from its place by the willow.

With ballooning flight

it picks up the sky

and makes off, loaded.

I wasn’t looking,

I heard the noise of its wings

and I turned,

I thought of a friend,

a cool one with binoculars,

here’s rarity

with big wing-flaps, suiting itself.

One yellow chicken

she picks up expertly and not untenderly

from the conveyor of chickens.

Its soft beak gobbles feverishly

at a clear liquid which might be

a dose of sugar-drenched serum –

the beak’s flexible membrane

seems to engulf the chicken

as it tries to fix on the dropper’s glass tip.

Clear yellow juice gulps through a tube

and a few drops, suddenly colourless,

swill round a gape wide as the brim of a glass

but the chicken doesn’t seem afraid –

or only this much, only for this long

until the lab assistant flicks it back on

to the slowly moving conveyor of chickens

and it tumbles, catches itself,

then buoyed up by the rest

reels out of sight, cheeping.

I’d climbed the crab-apple in the wind

that wild season of Cuba,

I leaned out on the twigs

to where clouds heeled over like sails

on the house-bounded horizon,

but even from here I felt the radio throb

like someone who was there when the accident happened

‘not two yards from where I was standing’,

then Big Band music cha-cha’d from room to room

to fill in time between news.

At school we learned ‘Quinquireme of Nineveh

from distant Ophir…’ The ships nudged closer.

The wind roared to itself like applause.

Dropped yolks of shore-lamp quiver on tarmac –

the night’s disturbed and the sea itself

sidles about after its storm, buttery,

melting along the groynes.

The sea’s a martinet with itself,

will come this far and no farther

like a Prussian governess

corrupted by white sugar –

Oh but the stealth

with which it twitches aside mortar

and licks, and licks

moist grains off the shore.

By day it simply keeps marching

beat after beat like waves of soldiers

timed to the first push. In step with the music

it swells greenness and greyness, spills foam

onto a fly-swarming tide-line –

beertabs and dropped King Cones,

flotsam of inopportune partners

sticky with what came after.

A man lies on his back

settled along the swell, his knees

glimmering, catching a lick of moonlight,

lazy as a seagull on Christmas morning –

He should have greased himself with whale-blubber

like a twelve-year-old Goddess-chested

cross-Channel swimmer.

His sadness stripes through him like ink

leaving no space or him.

He paws slow arm sweeps and rolls

where the sea shoulders him.

Up there an aeroplane falters,

its red landing-lights on

scouting the coast home.

The pilot smokes a cigarette.

Its tip winks with each breath.

We’re strung out on the plain’s upthrust,

bubbles against the sill of the horizon.

Already the dark folds each figure to itself

like a mother putting on her child’s overcoat,

or a paid attendant, who quickly and deftly

slots goose-pimpled arms into their stoles.

My own mother is attending to her daughters

in the Christmas gloom of our long garden

before the others are born.

A stream’s tongue takes its first courses:

in siren suits and our cheek-hugging bonnets

we put one foot each in that water.

Now standstill clumps sink and disappear

over the plate-edge of the world.

The trees hold up fingers like candelabra,

blue and unsure as the word ‘distant’.

Casually heeled there, we circle

the New Look skirts of our mother.

The attendant’s hands skim on a breast

fused into party-going ramparts of taffeta,

but he takes up his gaze into the hall

as if there’s nothing to be sorry or glad for,

and nothing in the snowy eternity

that feathers his keyhole.

In the corded hollows of the wood

leaves fall.

How light it is.

The trees are rinsing themselves of leaves

like Degas laundresses, their forearms

cold with the jelly-smooth

blue of starch-water.

The laundresses lean back and yawn

with their arms still in the water

like beech-boughs, pliant

on leavings of air.

In the corded hollows of the wood

how light it is.

How my excitement

burns in the chamber.

You’re breast-up in the bubbling spaces you make for yourself,

your head in the air, pointy, demure,

ridiculous in its petalled swim-cap.

You chug slowly across the pool.

Your legs trail. Your arms won’t sweep

more than a third of the full stroke,

yet when you look up you’re curling with smiles,

complicit as if splashed

with mile-deep dives from the cliff’s height.

A fat young man in
BERBER'S ICE CREAM PARLOUR

under a tiled ceiling the colour of farm butter

with a mirror at 45° to his jaw.

His moist jowls, lucent and young

as the tuck where a baby's buttock and thigh join,

quiver a little, preparing

to meet the order he's given.

A tall glass skims the waitress's breasts.

He holds on, spoon poised

to see if the syrup'll trickle right

past the mound of chopped nuts to the ice-

white luscious vanilla sheltering

under its blanket of cream.

The yellow skin weakens and melts.

He devotes himself,

purses his lips to wrinkling-point,

digs down with the long spoon

past jelly and fruit

to the depths, with the cool

inching of an expert.

Beside him there's a landscape in drained pink

and blue suggesting the sea

with an audacious cartoon economy.

They've even put in one white triangle

to make the horizon. A sail.

Large creamy girls mark the banana splits

with curls and squiggles,

pour sauce on peach melbas,

thumb in real strawberries.

Their bodies sail behind the counters,

balloons tight at the ropes, held down

by a customer's need for more clotted cream

topping on his three-tier chocolate sundae.

They have eight tables to serve.

With their left hands they slap out the change

and comets smelling of nickel

for kids' take-away treats,

and over on the bar counter there's room

for adult, luxurious absorption

of dark mocha ice cream.

Flowing, damp-curled, the waitresses

pass with their trays

doubled by mirrors, bumping like clouds.