Out of the Blue (15 page)

If you had said the words ‘to the forest’

at once I would have gone there

leaving my garden of broccoli and potato-plants.

I would not have struggled

to see the last ribbons of daylight

and windy sky tear over the crowns

of the oaks which stand here,

heavy draught animals

bearing, continually bearing.

I would have rubbed the velvety forest

against my cheek like the pincushion

I sewed with invisible stitches.

No. But you said nothing

and I have a child to think of

and a garden of parsnips and raspberries.

It’s not that I’m afraid,

but that I’m still gathering

the echoes of my five senses –

how far they’ve come with me, how far

they want to go on.

So the whale-back of the forest

shows for an instant, then dives.

I think it has oxygen within it

to live, downward, for miles.

Whichever way I turned on the radio

there was Sibelius

or an exceptionally long weather forecast.

Good practice: I’d purse up my lips

to the brief gulp of each phrase.

Sometimes I struck a chord with the World Service’s

sense-fuzz, like the smell of gardenia

perfume in Woolworth’s: instantly cloying,

the kind that doesn’t bloom on your skin,

or, in the two p.m. gloom of the town square,

I’d catch the pale flap of a poster

for the Helsingin Sanomat:
POMPIDOU KUOLLUT
.

I’d buy one, but never wrestle beyond the headline.

When pupils asked what I thought of ‘this three-day week’

I’d mention the candle-blaze

nightly in my room during the power-cuts,

and the bronchitis I had,

but I’d balance the fact that I smoked too much

against the marsh-chill when the heating went off.

I’d always stop on the railway bridge

even at one in the morning. The city was shapeless, squeezed in

by hills bristling with Sitka spruce.

The drunks had their fires lit

but they were slow, vulnerable, frozen

while flaming on a half-litre from the State Alcohol Shop.

If their luck held they’d bunch on the Sports Hall heating-grates

rather than be chipped free from a snow heap

in the first light of ten in the morning,

among a confusion of fur-hatted burghers

going to have coffee and cakes.

Work started at eight, there was never enough time.

They’d stop, chagrined, and murmur ‘It’s shocking’.

They were slowly learning not to buy the full-cream milk

of their farming childhoods; there was a government campaign

with leaflets on heart disease and exercise

and a broadsheet on the energy crisis

with diagrams suggesting the angles

beyond which windows should never be opened.

Their young might be trim, but they kept

a pious weakness for sinning on cake

and for those cloudy, strokeable hats

that frame Lutheran pallor.

After an evening visit to gym, they’d roll

the green cocoon of their ski-suited baby

onto the pupils’ table. Steadied with one hand

it lay prone and was never unpacked.

Lead me with your cold, sure hand,

make me press the correct buttons

on the automatic ticket machine,

make me not present my ticket upside down

to the slit mouth at the barriers,

then make the lift not jam

in the hot dark of the deepest lines.

May I hear the voice on the loudspeaker

and understand each syllable

of the doggerel of stations.

If it is rush-hour, let me be close to the doors,

I do not ask for space,

let no one crush me into a corner

or accidentally squeeze hard on my breasts

or hit me with bags or chew gum in my face.

If there are incidents, let them be over,

let there be no red-and-white tape

marking the place, make it not happen

when the tunnel has wrapped its arms around my train

and the lights have failed.

Float me up the narrow escalator

not looking backward, losing my balance

or letting go of your cold, sure hand.

Let there not be a fire

in the gaps, hold me secure.

Let me come home to the air.

By chance I was alone in my bed the morning

I woke to find my body had gone.

It had been coming. I’d cut off my hair in sections

so each of you would have something to remember,

then my nails worked loose from their beds

of oystery flesh. Who was it got them?

One night I slipped out of my skin. It lolloped

hooked to my heels, hurting. I had to spray on

more scent so you could find me in the dark,

I was going so fast. One of you begged for my ears

because you could hear the sea in them.

First I planned to steal myself back. I was a mist

on thighs, belly and hips. I’d slept with so many men.

I was with you in the ash-haunted stations of Poland,

I was with you on that grey plaza in Berlin

while you wolfed three doughnuts without stopping,

thinking yourself alone. Soon I recovered my lips

by waiting behind the mirror while you shaved.

You pouted. I peeled away kisses like wax

no longer warm to the touch. Then I flew off.

Next I decided to become a virgin. Without a body

it was easy to make up a new story. In seven years

every invisible cell would be renewed

and none of them would have touched any of you.

I went to a cold lake, to a grey-lichened island,

I was gold in the wallet of the water.

I was known to the inhabitants, who were in love

with the coveted whisper of my virginity:

all too soon they were bringing me coffee and perfume,

cash under stones. I could really do something for them.

Thirdly I tried marriage to a good husband

who knew my past but forgave it. I believed in the power

of his penis to smoke out all those men

so that bit by bit my body service would resume,

although for a while I’d be the one woman in the world

who was only present in the smile of her vagina.

He stroked the air where I might have been.

I turned to the mirror and saw mist gather

as if someone lived in the glass. Recovering

I breathed to myself, ‘
Hold on! I’m coming
.’

He’s going on holiday to lonely

but no one knows. He has got the sunblock

the cash and the baseball cap

shorts that looked nice in the shop

then two days’ indoor bicycling

to get his legs ready.

He plans to learn something in lonely.

Bits of the language, new dishes.

He would like to try out a sport –

jet-ski maybe, or fishing.

You are meant to be alone, fishing.

There are books about it at the airport.

In the departure lounge, he has three hours

to learn to harpoon a marlin

and to overhear the history

of that couple quarrelling

about Bourbon and Jamesons –

which is the best way to have fun.

He is starting to like the look of lonely

with its steady climate, its goals

anyone can touch. He settles

for drinking lots of Aqua Libra

and being glad about Airmiles

as the Australian across the aisle

plugs into
Who’s That Girl?

Waiting. I’m here waiting

like a cable-car caught in a thunderstorm.

At six someone will feed me, at seven

I’ll stroll and sit by the band.

I have never seen so many trombones

taking the air, or so many mountains.

Under them there are tunnels

to a troll’s salt-garden.

The lake is a dirty thumb-mark.

If nowhere has a middle

this lake is its navel,

pregnant with sickeningly large carp.

Bent as if travelling backwards, the birches

wipe the cheeks of 29 parasols.

A little girl scythes at her shuttlecock:

4, 6, 7 strokes –

there are 29 bright parasols

outfacing the sun

and the little girl wears a red cap

to blunt her vision.

I lie through half a morning

with my eyelids gummed down,

neither rising nor falling

until the next meal comes round.

I keep a straw in my mouth

so I can breathe,

I am drinking Sprite in a hotel,

I am a carp in the reeds.

Of course they’re dead, or this is a film.

Along the promenade the sun

moves down council-painted white lanes –

these are for cycling. On the other hand

the sea is going quietly out to France,

taking its time. If the cliffs are white,

iron stanchions are planted in them

so a bleed of rust can be seen

by the army rafting its way in

on lilos and pedalos. Professional cyclists

walk with one hand on the saddle,

waiting to be told to put on

red vests which show up in the race.

The aisle of the falling tide

squints to infinity, the bike-lane

is much in need of repainting

like the smile of the sea-front towards France.

In the less-than-shelter of the beach huts

two people I love are waiting

with as much infinity in their laps

as you can catch with a red vest on.

The cyclists flash past them –

one turns his keyed-up white face

but they are dead and this is a film.

On his skin the stink

of last night turned

to acetaldehyde.

What comes through the curtains must be light.

It combs the shadows of his brain

and frightens him.

Things not to think of crowd in.

The things she said

as if sick of saying them.

The jumpy blanks in what happened.

The way he skidded and there

was the kid looking,

staring through the bars of the landing

so I shouted
Monkey, Monkey

and danced but he wouldn’t laugh.

Or was that in the club?

I would never harm a hair

on the head of him.

If she doesn’t know that she knows nothing. 

Breast to breast against the azaleas

they pitch, father and daughter,

the sun throws itself down

golden, glittering,

pale orange petals clutter their hair

as he catches her shoulders,

braced, they grapple and bruise

among the perfumed azaleas.

The flowers loll out their tongues,

tigers on dark stems

while breast to breast against the azaleas

they pitch, father and daughter.

The ferry slides between islands.

Pale and immediate, the sun rises.

The hull noses white marker-posts

glittering in summer water –

here, now, the channel deepens,

the sky darkens. Too cold in her dress

the girl scutters. Engine vents veil

steam while rain hides Ahvenanmaa.

The thing about a saddle is that second

you see it so closely, sweat-grains

pointing the leather,

pulled stitching and all, and the pommel gone black

and reins wrapped over themselves.

You see it so closely

because you have one foot in the stirrup

and someone else has your heel in his hand.

Your heel in someone else’s hand

that second before they lift you, your face

turned to the saddle, the sweat marks

and smell of the horse, those stitches pulling

the way they tug and tear in your flesh

when you lie there in pain,

the hooves of it cutting,

trying to pin down the place, the time.

The nurse has your heel in her hand

yellow and still, already tender

though on Friday you were walking.

She is taking a pinprick

or else slowly, bit by bit, washing

your wrapped body from the heels upward

and talking, always talking.

She might want to ask someone

what way you would move when sunlight

filled the cobbles like straw,

or how without looking at it

you’d kick in place a zinc bucket

then bend and rub down the horse.