Out of the Blue (7 page)

Today is barred with darkness of winter.

In cold tents women protest,

for once unveiled, eyes stinging with smoke.

They stamp round fires in quilted anoraks,

glamourless, they laugh often

and teach themselves to speak eloquently.

Mud and the camp’s raw bones

set them before the television camera.

Absent, the women of old photographs

holding the last of their four children,

eyes darkened, hair covered,

bodies waxy as cyclamen;

absent, all these suffering ones.

New voices rip at the throat,

new costumes, metamorphoses.

Soft-skirted, evasive

women were drawn from the ruins,

swirls of ash on them like veils.

History came as a seducer

and said: this is the beauty of women

in bombfall. Dolorous

you curl your skirts over your sleeping children.

Instead they stay at this place

all winter; eat from packets and jars,

keep sensible, don’t hunger,

battle each day at the wires.

‘Fuck this staring paper and table –

I’ve just about had enough of it.

I’m going out for some air,’

he says, letting the wind bang up his sheets of poems.

He walks quickly; it’s cool,

and rainy sky covers both stars and moon.

Out of the windows come slight

echoes of conversations receding upstairs.

There. He slows down.

A dark side-street – thick bushes –

he doesn’t see them.

He smokes. Leaves can stir as they please.

(We clack like jackrabbits from pool to pool of lamplight.

Stretching our lips, we walk exposed

as milk cattle past heaps of rubbish

killed by the edge

of knowledge that trees hide

a face slowly detaching itself

from shadow, and starting to smile.)

The poet goes into the steep alleys

close to the sea, where fish scales line the gutter

and women prostitute themselves to men

as men have described in many poems.

They’ve said how milky, or bitter

as lemons they find her –

the smell of her hair

…vanilla…cinnamon…

there’s a smell for every complexion.

Cavafy tells us he went always

to secret rooms and purer vices;

he wished to dissociate himself

from the hasty unlacings of citizens

fumbling, capsizing –

white

flesh in a mound and kept from sight,

but he doesn’t tell us

whether these boys’ hair always smelled of cinnamon

or if their nights cost more than spices.

A woman goes into the night café,

chooses a clean

knife and a spoon

and takes up her tray.

Quickly the manageress leans from the counter.

(As when a policeman arrests a friend

her eyes plunge and her voice roughens.)

She points to a notice with her red nail:

‘After 11 we serve only accompanied females.’

The woman fumbles her grip

on her bag, and it slips.

Her forces tumble.

People look on as she scrabbles

for money and tampax.

A thousand shadows accompany her

down the stiff lino, through the street lighting.

The poet sits in a harbour bar

where the tables are smooth and solid to lean on.

It’s peaceful. Men gaze

for hours at beer and brass glistening.

The sea laps. The door swings.

The poet feels poems

invade him. All day he has been stone-breaking

he says. He would be happier in cafés

in other countries, drinking, watching;

he feels he’s a familiar sort of poet

but he’s at ease with it.

Besides, he’s not actually writing a poem:

there’s plenty, he’s sure,

in drink and hearing the sea move.

For what is Emily Dickinson doing

back at the house – the home?

A doctor emerges, wiping his face,

and pins a notice on the porch.

After a while you don’t even ask.

No history

gets at this picture:

a woman named Sappho

sat in bars by purple water

with her feet crossed at the ankles

and her hair flaming with violets

never smiling when she didn’t feel like it.

‘End here, it’s hopeful,’

says the poet, getting up from the table.

If no revolution come

star clusters

will brush heavy on the sky

and grapes burst

into the mouths of fifteen

well-fed men,

these honest men

will build them houses like pork palaces

if no revolution come,

short-life dust children

will be crumbling in the sun –

they have to score like this

if no revolution come.

The sadness of people

don’t look at it too long:

you’re studying for madness

if no revolution come.

If no revolution come

it will be born sleeping,

it will be heavy as baby

playing on mama’s bones,

it will be gun-thumping on Sunday

and easy good time

for men who make money,

for men who make money

grow like a roof

so the rubbish of people

can’t live underneath.

If no revolution come

star clusters

will drop heavy from the sky

and blood burst

out of the mouths of fifteen

washing women,

and the land-owners will drink us

one body by one:

they have to score like this

if no revolution come.

I hung up the sheets in moonlight,

surprised that it really was so

steady, a quickly moving pencil

flowing onto the stained cotton.

How the valves

in that map

of taut fabric

blew in and blew out

then spread flat

over the tiles

while the moon filled them with light.

A hundred feet above the town

for once the moonscape showed nothing extraordinary

only the clicking pegs

and radio news from our kitchen.

One moth hesitated

tapping at our lighted window

and in the same way the moonlight

covered the streets, all night.

Her fast asleep face turns from me,

the oil on her eyelids gleams

and the shadow of a removed moustache

darkens the curve of her mouth,

her lips are still flattened together

and years occupy her face,

her holiday embroidery glistens,

her fingers quiver then rest.

I perch in my pink dress

sleepiness fanning my cheeks,

not lurching, not touching

as the train leaps.

Mother you should not be sleeping.

Look how dirty my face is, and lick

the smuts off me with your salt spit.

Golden corn rocks to the window

as the train jerks. Your narrowing body leaves me

frightened, too frightened to cry for you.

The last day of the exhausted month

of August. Hydrangeas

purple and white like flesh immersed in water

with no shine

to keep the air off them

open their tepid petals more and more widely.

The newly-poured tar smells antiseptic

like sheets moulding on feverish skin:

surfaces of bedrock, glasslike passivity.

The last day of the exhausted month

goes quickly. A brown parcel

arrives with clothes left at the summer lodgings,

split and too small.

A dog noses

better not look at it too closely

God knows why they bothered to send them at all.

A smell of cat

joins us just before eating.

The cat is dead but its brown

smell still seeps from my tub of roses.

Coiled peel goes soft on the deserted table

where faïence, bubble glasses, and the rest

of riches thicken.

People have left their bread and potatoes.

Each evening baskets

of broken dinner hit the disposal unit.

Four children, product of two marriages,

two wives, countless slighter relations

and friends all come to the table

bringing new wines discovered on holiday,

fresh thirtyish faces, the chopped

Japanese dip of perfectly nourished hairstyles,

more children, more confident voices,

wave after wave consuming the table.

The father is a writer; the son

(almost incapable of speech)

explores him.

‘Why did you take my language

my childhood

my body all sand?

why did you gather my movements

waves pouncing

eyes steering me till I crumbled?

We're riveted. I'm in the house

hung up with verbiage like nets.

A patchwork monster at the desk

bending the keys of your electric typewriter.

You're best at talking. I know

your hesitant, plain vowels.

Your boy's voice, blurred,

passed through my cot bars, stealing my baby magic.

You were the one they smiled at.'

Up at the park once more

the afternoon ends.

My sister and I huddle in quilted jackets.

A cigarette burn

crinkles the pushchair waterproofs,

the baby relaxes

sucking his hood's curled edges.

Still out of breath

from shoving and easing the wheels

on broken pavement we stay here.

Daffodils break in the wintry bushes

and Ollie and Charles in drab parkas

run, letting us wait by the swings.

Under eskimo hoods their hair springs

dun coloured, child-smelling.

They squat, and we speak quietly,

occasionally scanning the indigo patched

shadows with children melted against them.

The winter fairs are all over.

The smells of coffee and naphtha

thin and are quite gone.

An orange tossed in the air

hung like a wonder

everyone would catch once,

the children’s excitable cheeks

and woollen caps that they wore

tight, up to the ears,

are all quietened, disbudded;

now am I walking the streets

noting a bit of gold paper? –

a curl of peeI suggesting the whole

aromatic globe in the air.

The summer cabins are padlocked.

Their smell of sandshoes

evaporates over the lake water

leaving pine walls to shoulder the ice.

Resin seals them in hard splashes.

The woodman

knocks at their sapless branches.

He gets sweet puffballs

and chanterelles in his jacket,

strips off fungus like yellow leather,

thumbs it, then hacks the tree trunk.

Hazy and cold as summer dawn

the day goes on,

wood rustles on wood,

close, as the mist thins

like smoke around the top of the pine trees

and once more the saw whines.

My train halts in the snowfilled station.

Gauges tick and then cease

on ice as the track settles

and iron-bound rolling stock creaks.

Two work-people

walk up alongside us,

wool-wadded, shifting their picks,

the sun, small as a rose,

buds there in the distance.

The gangs throw handfuls of salt like sowers

and light fires to keep the points moving.

Here are trees, made with two strokes.

A lady with a tray of white teacups

walks lifting steam from window to window.

I’d like to pull down the sash and stay

here in the blue where it’s still work time.

The hills smell cold and are far away

at standstill, where lamps bloom.

Often when the bread tin is empty

and there’s no more money for the fire

I think of you, and the breakfast you laid for me

– black bread and honey and beer.

I threw out a panful of wine yesterday –

the aluminium had turned sour –

I have two colours of bread to choose from,

I’d take the white if I were poor,

so indigence is distant as my hands

stiff in unheated washing water,

but you, with your generous gift of butter

and cheese with poppy seeds, all in one morning meal

have drawn the blinds up at the bedside window

and I can watch the ships’ tall masts appear.