Authors: Helen Dunmore
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.
(1994)
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.