Authors: Helen Dunmore
In the tea house the usual
customers sit with their cooling
tea glasses
and new pastries
sealed at the edge
with sticky droplets.
The waitress walks off,
calves solid and shapely as vases,
leaving a juicy baba
before her favourite.
Each table has bronze or white chrysanthemums
and the copper glass-stands imperceptibly
brush each other like crickets
suddenly focussed at dusk,
but the daily newspapers
dampened by steam
don’t rustle.
The tea house still has its blinds out
even though the sun is now amiably
yellow as butter
and people hurrying by raise up their faces
without abandon, briskly
talking to their companions;
no one sits out at the tables
except a travel-stained couple
thumbing a map.
The waitress reckons her cloths
watching the proprietor
while he, dark-suited, buoyant,
pauses before a customer.
Her gaze breaks upon the tea-house
like incoming water
joining sandbanks swiftly and
softly moving the pebbles,
moving the coloured sugar and coffee
to better places,
counting the pastries.
Cold pinches the hills around Florence.
It roots out vines, truffles for lemon trees
painfully heated by charcoal
to three degrees above freezing.
A bristling fir forest
moves forward over Tuscany.
A secret wood
riddled with worm and lifeless
dust-covered branches
stings the grass and makes it flowerless,
freezing the long-closed eyelids of Romans.
They sleep entrusted to darkness
in the perpetual, placid, waveless
music of darkness.
The forest ramps over frontiers and plains
and swallows voluble Customs men
in slow ash. A wind sound
scrapes its thatching of sticks.
Blind thrushes in the wood blunder
and drop onto the brown needles.
There are no nests or singing-places.
A forest of matchwood and cheap furniture
marches in rows. Nobody harvests
its spongey woods and makes the trunks sigh
like toy soldiers giving up life.
All over Italy and northward
from fair Florence to München
and the cold city of Potsdam
the forest spreads like a pelt
on meadows, terraces, riverbanks
and the shards of brick houses.
It hides everywhere from everywhere
as each point of perspective
is gained by herds of resinous firs.
There may be human creatures
at nest in the root sockets.
They whicker words to each other
against the soughing of evergreens
while the great faces of reindeer
come grazing beside the Arno.
The soft fields part in hedges, each
binds each, copse pleats
rib up the hillside.
Darkness is coming and grass
bends downward.
The cattle out all night
eat, knee-deep, invisible
unless a headlight arcs on their mild faces.
The night’s damp fastens, droplet by droplet,
onto the animals.
They vibrate to the passing of a missile launcher
and stir
their patient eyelashes.
A blackbird
startled by floodlights
reproduces morning.
Cattle grids tremble and clang,
boots scrape
holly bursts against wet walls
lost at the moment of happening.
(1988)
The Raw Garden
is a collection of closely-related poems, which are intended to speak to, through, and even over each other. The poems draw their full effect from their setting; they feed from each other, even when the link is as mild as an echo of phrasing or cadence.
It is now possible to insert new genes into a chromosomal pattern. It is possible to feed in new genetic material, or to remove what is seen as faulty or damaged material. The basic genetic code is contained in DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), and its molecular structure is the famous double helix, so called because it consists of two complementary spirals which match each other like the halves of a zip. Naturally-occurring enzymes can be used to split the double strand, and to insert new material. The separate strands are then recombined to form the complete DNA helix. By this process of gene-splicing a new piece of genetic information can be inserted into a living organism, and can be transmitted to the descendants of the organism.
It seems to me that there is an echo of this new and revolutionary scientific process in the way each poet feeds from the material drawn together in a long poetic tradition, “breaks” it with his or her individual creative voice, and
recombines
it through new poems.
One thing I have tried to do in these poems is to explore the effect which these new possibilities of genetic manipulation may have on our concept of what is natural and what is unnatural. If we can not follow Romantic poets in their assumption of a massive, unmalleable landscape which moulds the human creatures living upon it and provides them with a constant, stable frame of reference, then how do we look at landscape and at the “natural”? We are used to living in a profoundly human-made landscape. As I grew up I realised that even such apparently wild places as moors and commons were the product of human decisions and work: people had cut down trees, grazed animals, acquired legal rights. But still this knowledge did not interfere with my sense that these places were natural.
The question might be, what does it take to disturb the sense of naturalness held by the human being in his or her, landscape? Is there a threshold beyond which a person revolts at a feeling that changedness has gone too far? Many of these poems focus on highly manipulated landscapes and outcrops of “nature”, and on the harmonies and revulsions formed between them and the people living among them.
Perhaps the Garden of Eden embodies some yearning to print down an idea of the static and the predictable over our knowledge that we have to accept perpetual changeability. The code of the Garden of Eden has been broken open an infinite number of times. Now we are faced with a still greater potential for change, since we have acquired knowledge of the double helix structure of DNA. If the Garden of Eden really exists it does so moment by moment, fragmented and tough, cropping up like a fan of buddleia high up in the gutter of a deserted warehouse, or in a heap of frozen cabbages becoming luminous in the reflected
light off roadside snow. This Garden of Eden propagates itself in strange ways, some of which find parallels in far-fetched horticultural techniques such as air layering, or growing potatoes in a mulch of rotted seaweed on white sand. I hope that these poems do not seem to hanker back to a prelapsarian state of grace. If I want to celebrate anything, it is resilience, adaptability, and the power of improvisation.
The potatoes come out of the earth bright
as if waxed, shucking their compost,
and bob against the palm of my hand
like the blunt muzzles of seals swimming.
Slippy and pale in the washing-up bowl
they bask, playful, grown plump
in banks of seaweed on white sand,
seaweed hauled from brown circles
set in transparent waters off Easdale
all through the sun-fanned West Highland midnights
when the little potatoes are seeding there
to make necklaces under the mulch,
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.
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 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.
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.