Authors: Helen Dunmore
Those shady girls on the green side of the street,
those far-from-green girls who keep to the shade,
those shady girls in mysterious suits
with their labels half-showing
as the cream flap of the jacket swings open,
those girls kicking aside the front-panelled pleats
of their cream suits with cerise lapels,
those on-coming girls,
those girls swinging pearly umbrellas
as tightly-sheathed as tulips in bud
from an unscrupulous street-seller,
those girls in cream and cerise suits
which mark if you touch them,
those girls with their one-name appointments
who walk out of the sunshine.
Do they wake careless and warm
with light on the unwashed windows
and a perpetual smell of bacon,
do their hearts sink at today’s martyr
with his unpronounceable name
and strange manner of execution?
Do they wake out of the darkness
with hearts thudding like ours
and reach for the souvenir lamp-switch
then shove a chair against the door
and key facts into the desk-top computer
while cold rattles along the corridor?
Do they cry out in sleep
at some barely-crushed thought,
some failure to see the joke,
or do they rest in their dreams
along the surface of the water
like a bevy of dragonflies
slack and blue in the shallows
whirring among reed-mace and water-forget-me-not
while the ripples cluck?
Do they wake in ordinary time
to green curtains slapping the frame
of a day that’ll cloud later on,
to cars nudging and growling for space,
to a baptismal mother, wan with her eagerness
and her sleepless, milk-sodden nights?
Do they reach and stroke the uneven plaster
and sniff the lime-blossom threading
like silk through the room,
or do they wait, stretched out like babies
in the gold of its being too early
with sun on their ceilings wobbling like jelly
while their housekeepers jingle the milk-bottles
and cry ‘Father!’ in sixty-year-old voices
and scorch toast with devotion –
do they sense the milk in the pan rising
then dive with their blue chins, blundering
through prayer under their honeycomb blankets?
Sisters leaving before the dance,
before the caller gets drunk
or the yellow streamers unreel
looping like ribbons
here and there on the hair of the dancers,
sisters at the turn of the stairs
as the sound system
one-twos, as the squeezebox
mewed in its case
is slapped into breath, and that scrape
of the tables shoved back for the dance
burns like the strike of a match
in the cup of two hands.
Ripe melons and meat
mix in the binbags with cake
puddled in cherry-slime, wind
heavy with tar
blows back the yard door, and I’m
caught with three drinks in my hands
on the stairs looking up
at the sisters leaving before the dance,
not wishing to push past them
in their white broderie anglaise and hemmed
skirts civilly drawn
to their sides to make room
for the big men in suits,
and the girls in cerise
dance-slippers and cross-backed dresses
who lead the way up
and take charge of the tickets, and yet
from their lips cantaloupe
fans as they speak
in bright quick murmurs between
a violin ghosting a tune
and the kids in the bar downstairs
begging for Coke, peaky but certain.
The sisters say their
good nights
and all the while people stay bunched
on the stairs going up, showing respect
for the small words of the ones leaving,
the ones who don’t stay for the dancing.
One sister twists a white candle
waxed in a nest of hydrangeas –
brick-red and uncommon, flowers
she really can’t want – she bruises the limp
warm petals with crisp fingers
and then poises her sandal
over the next non-slip stair
so the dance streams at her heels
in the light of a half-shut door.
You put your hand over mine and whispered
‘There he is, laying against the pebbles’ –
you wouldn’t point for the shadow
stirring the trout off his bed
where he sculled the down-running water,
and the fish lay there, unbruised
by the soft knuckling of the river-bed
or your stare which had found him out.
Last night I seemed to be walking
with something in my hand, earthward, down-
dropping as lead, unburnished –
a plate perhaps or a salver
with nothing on it or offered
but its own shineless composure.
I have it here on my palm, the weight
settled, spreading through bone
until my wrist tips backward, pulled down
as if my arm was laid in a current
of eel-dark water – that thrum
binding the fingers – arrow-like –
Rain. A plump splash
on tense, bare skin.
Rain. All the May leaves
run upward, shaking.
Rain. A first touch
at the nape of the neck.
Sharp drops kick the dust, white
downpours shudder
like curtains, rinsing
tight hairdos to innocence.
I love the privacy of rain,
the way it makes things happen
on verandahs, under canopies
or in the shelter of trees
as a door slams and a girl runs out
into the black-wet leaves.
By the brick wall an iris
sucks up the rain
like intricate food, its tongue
sherbetty, furred.
Rain. All the May leaves
run upward, shaking.
On the street bud-silt
covers the windscreens.
That lake lies along the shore
like a finger down my cheek,
its waters lull and collapse
dark as pomegranates,
the baby crawls on the straw
in the shadow-map of his father’s chair
while the priest talks things over
and light dodges across his hair.
There’s a lamp lit in the shed
and a fire on, and a man drinking
spiritus fortis he’s made for himself.
But on the floor of the barn
the dancing man is beginning to dance.
First a beat from the arch of his foot
as he stands upright, a neat
understatement of all that’s in him
and he lowers his eyes to her
as if it’s nothing, nothing –
but she has always wanted him.
Her baby crawls out from the chairs
and rolls in his striped vest laughing
under the feet of the dancers
so she must dance over him
toe to his cheek, heel to his hair,
as she melts to the man dancing.
They are talking and talking over there –
the priest sits with his back to her
for there’s no malice in him
and her husband glistens like the sun
through the cypress-flame of the man dancing
In the shed a blackbird
has left three eggs which might be kumquats –
they are so warm. One of them’s stirring –
who said she had deserted them?
In the orchard by the barn
there are three girls wading,
glossy, laughing at something,
they spin a bucket between them,
glowing, they are forgotten –
something else is about to happen.
The bathers, where are they? The sea is quite empty,
lapsed from its task of rinsing the white beach.
The promenade has a skein of walkers, four to the mile,
like beads threaded on the long Boulevard in front of the flowers.
Shutters are all back on the bankers’ fantasy houses,
but the air inside is glassy as swimming-pool water,
no one breathes there or silts it with movement,
Out of the kitchen a take-away steam rises:
the bankers are having sushi in honour of their guests
who are here, briefly, to buy ‘an impressionist picture’.
A boy is buried up to his neck in sand
but the youth leader stops another who pretends to piss on him.
The rest draw round, they have got something helpless:
his head laid back on its platter of curls.
With six digging, he’s out in a minute.
They oil his body with Ambre Solaire,
two boys lay him across their laps, a third
wipes at his feet then smiles up enchantingly.
I see the boys at the breakwater
straighten now, signalling friends,
and the little imperious one who is just not
dinted at the back of the arms
with child-like softness
sticks up his thumb to mark the next leap.
This far off it’s peaceful to watch them
while I’m walking ahead barefoot
on a wide, grey Norman promenade,
thinking of the Baron de Charlus
not in his wheelchair but younger,
bumbling into seduction in a hot courtyard,
tipped upside-down like a sand-timer,
labelled implacably – ‘the invert’
caught at the wide-striped
dawn years of the century
where the candy of skirts blows inward and outward
to a pure, bellying offshore wind.
The beautiful line of his coat ripples –
he’s Baron Hardup with dreams tupping
like pantomime horses – he fixes his eyeglass
and glares at the waves with passionate indecisiveness
as if to stop, or not stop, their irregular fall,
while the boys figure what he is good for.
After a night jagged by guard-dogs and nightingales
I sit to be videoed
at the corner of this carved balcony
where ten o’clock sun falls
past the curve of the Berlin Wall.
It’s nearly May Day.
Just here there’s a double wall –
a skin of concrete, a skin of stone
the colour of the Alsatians.
My feet shift on the slats.
I want to comb my hair straight.
I have my back
to a wood in the closed zone –
an orchard’s bright pelt
sparkling with blossom tips.
Bees fly in purposeful zigzags
over the Wall, tracing their map
of air and nectar.
Each day they fly through the spoors
of air-wiping floodlights now
sheathed in the watch-towers
to this one apple tree
which makes a garden of itself
under the balcony.
I have my back to the church.
Its roof glows in the gaps
where slate after slate’s peeled off.
I have my back to the porch
with its red lining of valerian,
its sound like a cough
as the doors squeeze themselves shut.
Katja unrolls cable
over the balcony rail.
A double wiring of roses
straddles the pews
in a hamlet which is the other half of here,
clear and suggestive as a mirror.
They say nobody lives there
but guards’ wives and children.
You rarely see them,
they melt into the woods like foxes
but you hear their motorbikes miles off
clutching the road surface.
You might hear the guards’ wives say
‘Let the kids have the grapes’
just as the nightingales insist
for hours when you can’t sleep.
This hamlet’s like something I’ve dreamed
in a dream broken by rain,
with its lilac and dull green
tenderly shifting leaves,
its woodpiles,
its watched inhabitants,
wives of the guards
who have between them a little son
in a too-tight yellow jersey
flashing along their own balcony.
He runs from his steep-roofed home
to scrabble onto his tricycle
and race with fat frantic legs pedalling
the few square metres marked by the wives
with a shield-square of clothes-line
where they’re forever hanging things out
while my back’s turned.
I study the guards’ underpants
and wish I still smoked
so I could blow smoke-rings
from the balcony of Jagdschloss Glienicke
past the flowering jaws of the apple tree
over complicated roof-shells
to the child himself.
I’d wave, holding the cigarette
cupped behind my back.
Any time they choose
people are changing Deutschmarks
for a tick on cheap paper,
a day-trip to the East
to buy Bulgarian church music
and butter at half-price,
to check their faces in a mirror
and get it all on video.
to walk through a map of mirrors
into the other half of here.
There’s mist on the Glienicke bridge.
The flags are limp.
There’s nothing flying at all –
not a flag, not an aeroplane
racing down safe corridors.
It’s nearly May Day.
A riot’s ripening in Kreuzberg.
If this is Spring, it’s going on elsewhere
grasping horse-chestnut buds
in sticky hands
warm and forgetful
as a child who buries himself
for joy in Pankow’s warm sands.
[September 1989]