Authors: Helen Dunmore
For all frozen things –
my middle finger that whitens
from its old, ten-minute frostbite,
for black, slimy potatoes
left in the clamp,
for darkness and cold like cloths
over the cage,
for permafrost, lichen crusts
nuzzled by reindeer,
the tender balance of decades
null as a vault.
For all frozen things –
the princess and princes
staring out of their bunker
at the original wind,
for
NATO
survivors in nuclear moonsuits
whirled from continent to continent
like Okies in bumpy Fords
fleeing the dustbowl.
For all frozen things –
snowdrops and Christmas roses
blasted down to the germ
of their genetic zip-code.
They fly by memory –
cargo of endless winter,
clods of celeriac, chipped
turnips, lanterns at ten a.m.
in the gloom of a Finnish market lace;
flowers under glass, herring,
little wizened apples.
For all frozen things –
the nipped fish in a mess of ice,
the uncovered galleon
tossed from four centuries of memory,
or nuclear snowsuits bouncing on dust,
trapped on the rough ride of the earth’s surface,
on the rough swing of its axis,
like moon-men lost on the moon
watching the earth’s green flush
tremble and perish.
Later my stepson will uncover a five-inch live shell
from a silted pool on the beach at St Côme. It is complete
with brass cap and a date on it: nineteen forty-three.
We’ll look it up in the dictionary, take it
to show at the Musée de la Libération
– ce petit obus – but once they unwrap it
they’ll drop the polite questions and scramble
full tilt for the Gendarmerie opposite.
The gendarmes will peer through its cradle of polythene
gingerly, laughing. One’s at the phone
already – he gestures – ‘Imagine! Let’s tell them
we’ve got a live shell here in the Poste!’
Of course this will have happened before.
They’ll have it exploded, there’ll be no souvenir shell-case,
and we’ll be left with our photographs
taken with a camera which turns out to be broken.
Later we’ll be at the Château Fontaine-Henry
watching sleek daughters in jodhpurs come in from the fields.
I’ll lie back in my green corduroy coat, and leave,
faint, to drive off through fields of sunflowers
without visiting the rooms we’ve paid for.
Madame will have her fausse-couche,
her intravenous injections, her glass ampoules,
in a room which is all bed
and smells of medicinal alcohol and fruit.
The children will play on the beach, a little forlornly,
in the wind which gusts up out of nowhere.
Later we’ll see our friends on their lightweight bicycles
freewheeling tiredly downhill to Asnelles.
Their little son, propped up behind them
will glide past, silent, though he alone sees us.
But now we are on the beach at Cabourg,
stopped on our walk to look where the sky’s whitening
over the sea beyond Dives. Now a child squawks
and races back as a wave slaps over his shorts’ hem
to where a tanned woman with naked breasts
fidgets her baby’s feet in the foam
straight down from the Boulevard Marcel Proust.
It’s not the four-wheeled drive crawler
spitting up dew and herbs,
not Dalapon followed by dressings
of dense phosphates,
nor ryegrass greening behind wire as behind glass,
not labourers wading in moonsuits
through mud gelded by paraquat –
but now, the sun-yellow, sky-blue
vehicles mount the pale chalk,
the sky bowls on the white hoops
and white breast of the roughland,
the farmer with Dutch eyes
guides forward the quick plough.
Now, flush after flush of Italian ryegrass
furs up the roughland
with its attentive, bright,
levelled-off growth –
pale monoculture
sweating off rivers of filth
fenced by the primary
colours of crawler and silo.
The land pensions, like rockets
shoot off from wheat with a soft yellow
flame-bulb: a rook or a man in black
flaps upwards with white messages.
On international mountains and spot markets
little commas of wheat translate.
The stony ground’s pumped to a dense fire
by the flame-throwing of chemicals.
On stony ground the wheat can ignite
its long furls.
The soft rocket of land pensions flies
and is seen in Japan, covering
conical hills with its tender stars:
now it is firework time, remembrance
and melt-down of autumn chrysanthemums.
On bruised fields above Brighton
grey mould laces the wheat harvest.
The little rockets are black. Land pensions
fasten on silos elsewhere, far off.
Market men flicker and skulk like eels
half-way across earth to breed.
On thin chipped flint-and-bone land
a nitrate river laces the grey wheat
pensioning off chalk acres.
Decoding a night’s dreams
of sheepless uplands
the wool-merchant clings to the wool churches,
to trade with the Low Countries,
to profitable, downcast
ladies swathed in wool sleeves
whose plump, light-suffused faces
gaze from the triptychs he worships.
Sheep ticks, maggoty tails and foot-rot
enter his tally of dense beasts, walking
with a winter’s weight on their backs
through stubborn pasture
they graze to a hairsbreadth.
From the turf of the Fire Hills
the wool-merchant trawls
sheep for the marsh markets.
They fill mist with their thin cries –
circular eddies, bemusing
the buyers of mutton
from sheep too wretched to fleece.
In the right angle of morning sunshine
the aerial photographer
shoots from the blue,
decodes a landscape
of sheepless uplands
and ploughed drove roads,
decodes the airstream, the lapis lazuli
coat for many compacted skeletons
seaming the chalk by the sea.
O engines
flying over the light, barren
as shuttles, thrown over a huge
woof
crossply
of hedgeless snail tracks,
you are so high,
you’ve felled the damp crevices
you’ve felled the boulder-strewn meadow
the lichen
the strong plum tree.
O engines
swaying your rubber batons
on pods, on ripe lupins,
on a chameleon terrace
of greenlessness,
you’re withdrawn from a sea
of harvests, you’re the foreshore
of soaked soil leaching
undrinkable streams.
The wood-pigeon rolls soft notes off its breast
in a tree which grows by a fence.
The smell of creosote,
easy as wild gum
oozing from tree boles
keeps me awake. A thunderstorm
heckles the air.
I step into a bedroom
pungent with child’s sleep,
and lift the potty and pile of picture books
so my large shadow
crosses his eyes.
Sometimes at night, expectant,
I think I see the shadow of my mother
bridge a small house of enormous rooms.
Here are white, palpable walls
and stories of my grandmother:
the old hours of tenderness I missed.
The rain was falling down in slow pulses
between the horse-chestnuts, as if it would set root there.
It was a slate-grey May evening
luminous with new leaves.
I was at a talk on the appearances of Our Lady
these past five years at Medjugorje.
We sat in a small room in the Presbytery:
the flow of the video scratched, the raindrop
brimmed its meniscus upon the window
from slant runnel to sill.
Later I watched a programme on air layering.
The round rootball steadied itself
high as a chaffinch nest, and then deftly
the gardener severed the new plant.
She knew its wounded stem would have made roots there.
It was too hot, that was the argument.
I had to walk a mile with my feet flaming
from brown sandals and sun.
Now the draggling shade of the privet made me to dawdle,
now soft tarmac had to be crossed.
I was lugging an old school-bag –
it was so hot the world was agape with it.
One limp rose fell as I passed.
An old witch sat in her front garden
under the spokes of a black umbrella
lashed to her kitchen chair.
God was in my feet as I fled past her.
Everyone I knew was so far away.
The yellow glob of my ice cream melted and spread.
I bought it with huge pennies, held up.
‘A big one this time!’ the man said,
so I ate on though it cloyed me.
It was for fetching the bread
one endless morning before Bank Holiday.
I was too young, that was the argument,
and had to propitiate everyone:
the man with the stroke, and the burnt lady
whose bared, magical teeth made me
smile if I could –
Oh the cowardice of my childhood!
The dry glasshouse is almost empty.
A few pungent geraniums with lost markings
lean in their pots.
It is nothing but a cropping place for sun
on cold Northumbrian July days.
The little girl, fresh from suburbia,
cannot believe in the peaches she finds here.
They are green and furry as monkeys –
she picks them and drops them.
All the same they are matched to the word peach
and must mean more than she sees. She will post them
unripe in a tiny envelope
to her eight-year-old class-mates, and write
carefully in the ruled-up spaces:
‘Where we are the place is a palace.’
The bald glasshouses stretch here for miles.
For miles air-vents open like wings.
This is the land of reflections, of heat
flagging from. mirror to mirror. Here cloches
force on the fruit by weeks, while pulses
of light run down the chain of glasshouses
and blind the visitors this Good Friday.
The daffodil pickers are spring-white.
Their neat heads in a fuzz of sun
stoop to the buds, make leafless
bunches of ten for Easter.
A white thumb touches the peat
but makes no print. This is the soil-less
Eden of glasshouses, heat-stunned.
Epworth Rectory was the childhood home of John Wesley.
In December 1716 the house was possessed by a poltergeist;
after many unsuccessful attempts at exorcism the spirit,
nicknamed ‘Old Jeffery’ by the little Wesley girls, left
of its own accord
.
Old Jeffery begins his night music.
The girls, sheathed in their brick skin,
giggle with terror. The boys are all gone
out to the world, ‘continually sinning’,
their graces exotic and paid for.
Old Jeffery rummages pitchforks
up the back chimney. The girls
open the doors to troops of exorcists
who plod back over the Isle of Axeholme
balked by the house. The scrimmage
of iron, shattering windows, and brickwork
chipped away daily is birdsong
morning and evening, or sunlight
into their unsunned lives.
Old Jeffery tires of the house slowly.
He knocks the back of the connubial bed
where nineteen Wesleys, engendered in artlessness
swarm, little ghosts of themselves.
The girls learn to whistle his music.
The house bangs like a side-drum
as Old Jeffery goes out of it. Daughters
in white wrappers mount to the windows, sons
coming from school make notes – the wildness
goes out towards Epworth and leaves nothing
but the bald house straining on tiptoe
after its ghost.