Out of the Blue (18 page)

A candle for the ship’s breakfast

eaten while moving southward

through mild grey water

with the work all done,

a candle for the house seen from outside,

the voices and shadows

of the moment before coming home,

a candle for the noise of aeroplanes

going elsewhere, passing over,

for delayed departures, embarrassed silences

between people who love one another,

a candle for sandwiches in service stations

at four a.m., and the taste of coffee

from plastic cups, thickened with sugar

to keep us going,

a candle for the crowd around a coffin

and the terrible depth it has to fall

into the grave dug for everyone,

the deaths for decades to come,

our deaths; a candle for going home

and feeling hungry after saying

we would never be able to eat the ham,

the fruit cake, those carefully-buttered buns.

He is the one you can count on

for yesterday’s bread, rolling tobacco

and the staccato

tick of the blinds

on leathery Wednesday afternoons.

He has hand-chalked boards with the prices

of Anchor butter and British wine.

He doesn’t hold with half-day closing.

He’s the king of long afternoons

lounging vested in his doorway.

He watches the children dwindle

and dawdle, licking icepops

that drip on the steps.

His would be the last face that saw them

before an abduction. Come in,

he is always open.

is the same as ours, but different.

Back to front stairs, and a bass that thuds

like the music of demolition

year after year, but the house

is still standing.

When we have parties they tense into silence,

though they are good at fighting.

After the last screech and slam, their children

play war on their scab of a lawn.

We are mirrors of one another,

never showing what’s real.

If I turn like this, quickly,

and look over the fence, what will I see?

One year he painted his front door yellow.

It was the splash of a carrier bag

in the dun terrace,

but for the rest he was inconspicuous.

He went out one way and came back the other,

often carrying laundry and once compost

for the tree he thought might do in the back yard.

Some time later there was its skeleton

taking up most of the bin.

He passed the remark ‘It’s a pity’

when it rained on a Saturday,

and of a neighbour’s child he said ‘terror’.

He picked his words like scones from a plate,

dropping no crumbs. When his front door shut

he was more gone than last Christmas.

But for the girls stored in his cellar

to learn what it meant

to have no pity, to be terror,

he was there.

Here at my worktop, foil-wrapping a silver salmon

– yes, a whole salmon – I’m thinking

of the many bodies of women

that my husband daily opens.

Here he lunges at me in wellingtons.

He is up to his armpits, a fisherman

tugging against the strength of the current.

I imagine the light for him, clean,

and a green robing of willow

and the fish hammering upstream.

I too tug at the flaps of the salmon

where its belly was, trying to straighten

the silver seams before they are sewn.

We are one in our dreams.

The epidural is patchy, his assistant’s

handwriting is slipping. At eleven fifteen

they barb their patient to sleep, jot ‘knife to skin’,

and the nurse smiles over her mask at the surgeon.

But I am quietly dusting out the fish-kettle,

and I have the salmon clean as a baby

grinning at me from the table.

The boy in the boat, the tip of the pole,

slow swing of the boat as the wash goes round

from other boats with lights on, heading home

to islands, from islands: anyway they come.

Thirty-four bass, small bass, not worth keeping.

See them in the water, the hang

of twice-caught fish playing dumb,

then the shake-off of air. The kickdown

always surprises you, makes your feet grip

on the planks of the boat. There is the line

disappearing into the sunset

or so it seems, but it is plumbed

by your finger, which sees nothing

but a breeze of line running through water.

Behind you a sheet of fire

does something to pole, to boat, to boy.

Hare in the snow cresting

the run of winter, stretching

in liquid leaps over the hill,

then the wind turns, and

hare stands so still

he is a freeze of himself, fooling

the shadows into believing

he is one of them.

I know that no one dare judge another’s need,

for need is our neighbour, blood to our bone:

the prisoner in Long Lartin, the poor of shantytown

bearing children, burdened by bad landlords,

struggling to scrape together what goes straight out

on rent, on never enough food for the children

who cry like crickets from hunger, night-long.

They slave while they’re sick with hunger,

wake in the damp of winter, crouch between wall and cradle

to rock the crying baby, their raw fingers

chapped with outworking, seaming denim

for half nothing, pitiful labour paid by the hour

which takes them nowhere, only to one more

half-hour’s heat on the meter, scraping and struggling,

working for nothing.

The misery of women in run-down hostels

the misery of the men crammed in with them

racked by the nothing that is all they have,

too proud to beg, to show they are slowly starving

withering away, their poverty hidden like AIDS,

a shame that must never be shown to their neighbours

a shame that has made strangers of neighbours

and hunger the only guest at all their meals.

The world has kicked into me the future

of children born into poverty’s welcome

to parents who have nothing but surplus labour,

empty hands, thoughts nobody wants.

Chips are their Sunday roast, dog-ends rolled up in Rizlas

damp down the parents’ hunger as they look on

while the kids eat baked beans and bacon.

By the State’s cold calculation

they could get by on carrots and bakers’ leavings.

Only love can help them.

These will not beg, but there are beggars

who shoot up everything they’re given

who have nothing at all wrong with them

who could perfectly well do a day’s work

who deserve no pity, no money, nothing.

Even if they collapse on the streets, coughing

from the come-back of ancient diseases

think nothing of it. Don’t be ashamed to walk past

with your wallet stuffed with credit cards

as the Bible says.

But yet. Look again. What about these beggars

who look perfectly all right, able to do a day’s work,

ought to be cleared off the streets – all that? And yet

some of them come from another world, or another time.

Care in the community is the cold calculation

that takes care of them. Stop. Look again.

They live by the phases of the moon

by an inner fire that will not leave them alone.

They are penniless as time and tide, wander with nothing

like the holy apostles, Peter and Paul.

They have no time for preaching or miracles

but they can speak in tongues if you listen,

and catch the wind of truth in the sails

of what seems like play.

God who can do anything

might have made them businessmen,

but instead he made them his own children

and sent them out with empty bank accounts

holey jeans and a blanket to wrap around them.

These secret disciples break all the rules but his,

the one rule that tells us to love, and give.

Think. You will even put up with poets

for the sake of their patrons, if these are rich men,

publishers who fancy culture, and keep a newspaper.

Think of the Lord of heaven who has sent his children

to be called madmen, and please him

if you can, by throwing some cash at them.

And think again. When you are begging

for God’s pardon, when the daylight after death

shines on your sins, think of them,

God’s secret children, born pardoned,

and what you did for them.

Sometimes in the rough garden of city spaces

where I believe a mugger will not approach me

because so far no mugger has approached me

I stop to take breath.

The city exists by acts of faith

that we and our children are safe,

that the pounding wheels of cars will miss them,

that the traffic will stop when the lights turn,

that parks will stay green, that money is not everything,

that the lime trees that line our streets are lopped and cropped

with the best of intentions,

that the orange glow of the streetlamps is moonlight

to that couple there, locked in each other, lost

in the city’s night-time suspension.

I should like to be buried in a summer forest

where people go in July,

only a bus ride from the city,

I should like them to walk over me

not noticing anything but sunlight

and patches of wild strawberries –

Here! Look under the leaves!

I should like the child who is slowest

to end up picking the most,

and the big kids will show the little

the only way to grasp a nettle

and pick it so it doesn’t sting.

I should like home-time to come

so late the bus has its lights on

and a cloud of moths hangs in their beam,

and when they are all gone

I should like to be buried in a summer forest

where the dark steps

blindfold, on cat foot-pads,

with the dawn almost touching it.

First, the echo

at night, when I said

‘I’ll hold you’

and your voice like a bird’s in the grey morning

came back ‘Hold you’,

and your feet in my palm

were barely hardened by walking,

and then the scattering,

the start of grammar

and distance.

You say, ‘Hold me.’

You’ll say, ‘Don’t hold me.’

Tonight there’s a crowd in my head:

all the things you are not yet.

You are words without paper, pages

sighing in summer forests, gardens

where builders stub out their rubble

and plastic oozes its sweat.

All the things you are, you are not yet.

Not yet the lonely window in midwinter

with the whine of tea on an empty stomach,

not yet the heating you can’t afford and must wait for,

tamping a coin in on each hour.

Not the gorgeous shush of restaurant doors

and their interiors, always so much smaller.

Not the smell of the newsprint, the blur

on your fingertips – your fame. Not yet

the love you will have for Winter Pearmains

and Chanel No.5 – and then your being unable

to buy both washing-machine and computer

when your baby’s due to be born,

and my voice saying, ‘I’ll get you one’

and you frowning, frowning

at walls and surfaces which are not mine –

all this, not yet. Give me your hand,

that small one without a mark of work on it,

the one that’s strange to the washing-up bowl

and doesn’t know Fairy Liquid from whiskey.

Not yet the moment of your arrival in taxis

at daring destinations, or your being alone at stations

with the skirts of your fashionable clothes flapping

and no money for the telephone.

Not yet the moment when I can give you nothing

so well-folded it fits in an envelope –

a dull letter you won’t reread.

Not yet the moment of your assimilation

in that river flowing westward: river of clothes,

of dreams, an accent unlike my own

saying to someone I don’t know:
darling
…