Authors: Helen Dunmore
Mr Lear has left a ring in his room.
Is it of value, is it an heirloom?
Should we pack it with brown paper and string
And post it after him?
He hasn't the air of a marrying man
He hasn't a husbandly air.
No, his gait is startled and sudden,
And is he quite all there?
Poor Mr Lear has left a ring in his room
And it's not of value, it's never an heirloom,
But we'll pack it with brown paper and string
And we'll send it wherever he's gone.
Two of us on the tired pavement
with the present pushing past
into the pungent smoke of the coffee-shop,
carrier bags stuffed with cargo
from Wal-mart and Tesco.
A tree of heaven, bright yellow
spreads its leaves above the peardrop
solvent scent of ASNU VALETING SERVICES.
She looks where I’m looking
this woman who asks questions
and tells me everything I’ve ever done.
For twenty pounds she’ll give me a golden future
for ten pounds she’ll give me a silver future
for a fiver a slam of bronze.
I believe in the glow of the leaves
in the shine of car-wax, in Wal-mart
and in the whiteness of her false teeth.
She would like to lie, but whatever possesses her
won’t let her. Here it comes again
clearing the coffee-smoke, thinning the cargo
of carrier bags pushing past us,
until the Saturday men and women
lose their foothold in time.
Now they are the dead walking
at the pace of long-ago film.
There he stands, blind on slivovitz,
eyes closed, face beatific,
propped against the side of the coach
while two girls rub him with snow.
He goes sleeveless in the snow
as if he belongs elsewhere
in a land where blood alone
is enough to warm him.
But this isn’t spring. A hyacinth’s
white whip of root in a jar in November
won’t stop winter. The sun will go down,
the wolves will sample the woods
and snuff his footprints. But the engine’s running.
Its vibration scrubs him awake
and those girls are laughing.
In ten long easy minutes
he will have left the summit.
is to go back, but never quite back.
Through all those trees I am unable
to glimpse the house. Where the new road swings,
the dark lane made for footsteps remains hidden.
Where lilac-striped convolvulus
wound its scent in the dust, new road signs
describe the route in numeral and symbol.
There is the hill, but not the right hill.
There is a blood-red rhododendron
by a breeze-block wall – but not the right wall,
and those children in a sunburned straggle
who face the oncoming traffic (thicker now),
have bought the wrong sweets at the wrong prices.
They have too much cash: they are not the right children.
Clearing the mirror to see your face
I’m sure you are there.
You came into the room behind me
but when I looked you disappeared.
Look. I am breathing out mist
like a horse in winter.
The glass I almost kissed
has gone cold. Now, is it you here
sitting in your usual chair
under the light, with your Guinness poured
and the best bit of the newspaper?
Let’s have a tenner on Papillon, I’m sure
he’ll do it this time
. You show me the form.
I put out my hand for the winnings
and take the notes which are warm
from your touch. But the mirror is cold, sparkling.
How hushed the sentence is this morning
like snowfall: words change the landscape
by hiding what they touch.
‘How is he –? Has he –?’
Bridget takes off her glasses
and rubs the red pulp of her eyelids.
The world is a treasure-house of frost
and sparkling roof-tops. A few doors down
the sentence works itself out.
A roller-blader slashes the street like an angel
with heaven-red cheeks. A fag-end smokes
in the gutter where a dog noses. Such elation!
The labour of goodbyes
goes on quietly behind windows.
With short, harsh breaths
and lips hitched to each syllable
you read, but not aloud.
You rise and go to the stairwell
as if to call someone. Look up
at the whitish skylight, the peace
of another rain-pocked eleven o’clock.
You are here and you want her
but she’ll come no more.
You keep her letters in a box
and deal them out like patience
to lie on your breakfast table
stamps obsolete, envelope eagerly torn
by the man who once lived in your skin.
You read the postmark again.
It’s September, four years after the war.
Listen. She’s speaking.
It was you I heard, your tiger pad on the stairs,
your animal eyes blazing. Now you have my face
between your paws, tiger. It’s time
for the first breath. Your playful embrace.
Suddenly you take away my texture,
the sheen I’ve had since I was born.
My hair. You comb it out with your claws
until the gloss and colour are gone.
My skin puckers slowly. Your whiskers quiver
as I keep still between your fore-feet
while you drink my juices, and for the first time
rake the lightest glissade down my cheeks.
Time for you, tiger, to do as you want.
I heard your footfall and waited in the dark,
expecting you. When will you come?
I can’t say why so many coffin-makers
have come together here. Company, maybe.
More likely jealousy bites their lips
when they see another’s golden coffin
where the corpse will fit like a nut.
No doubt they swap the lids about
at dead of night, scratch the silken cheeks of the wood
so when the mourners come to watch the hammer
bounce off the nails, they’ll say it’s no good
and in their white clothes they’ll swarm
all over the coffin-maker like angry ghosts.
There’s no need for it to be like this.
They could lend their tools to one another.
They could watch each other’s little shrines
in case the candle goes out. Instead they blow it out
and sourly scour the insides of another cheap
deal coffin for the common man.
How many golden coffins can anyone want?
Of those who appear at the alley-end,
they prefer the advance buyers. It takes know-how
to select a coffin for yourself.
‘In our family it’s cancer. Allow for shrinkage.’
‘Dropsy does us. Add it on to the width.’
Can a man know the shape of the wood
that will encase him? Can a woman
close her eyes and breathe in the scent of cedar?
These are the ones the coffin-makers like
to sit with by the spirit-lamp. For these they bring out
tea-plums, infuse
Silver Needle
and drink before they do the measuring.
Time to compare wood-shavings,
rubbing their curls between the fingers. Meanwhile
man and wife from the flat upstairs
take their blue bird for a walk
to the evening park, still in its cage.
Snug as a devil’s toenail embedded
in blue liass, plastic
in your movements as in dreams, you kick
for headiness at the rich
red walls that close on you like elastic.
But now they’ve shucked you out, bare-naked
in the devil’s kitchen, toes curled
flinching from chip scraps, ash,
lino sticky with beer tack,
the nail-on-nylon scrape of the cold world.
You are born, wed, dead, buried.
The wooden walls of your coffin
grip like hands, reassuring. You bang them
for joy that they’ll bang back, booming
that you’re hidden, hidden, hidden within.
The halls are thronged, the grand staircase murmurous.
There’s a smell of close-packed bodies, lilac,
hair-gel and sweat. Handprints on the brass railings
fade like breath on a cold window.
Outside the city is stunned with snow.
There he is, just where he should be
by that leather-topped, deeply-scored table
where fortunes are lost and made. He explains,
and those at the back lean closer
to catch the ripple of laughter.
A joke, and the group dissolves
to stare, study, and point a finger.
He waits for them to catch up with him.
You need a guide, with so many rooms
and between them, so many turnings.
I am there too, but not speaking.
I wait while the paint peels,
alone with the pulse of a Matisse
and the sunlight beating full on us.
But perhaps I say this
as I see him hasten down another staircase:
‘You always had a blessing with you,
and you still have a blessing with you.
Keep moving. Go as fast as you can
and whatever I say, don’t listen.’
(1994)
I lay and heard voices
spin through the house
and there were five minutes to run
for the snow-slewed school bus.
My mother said they had caught it
as she wiped stars from the window –
the frost mended its web
and she put her snow-cool hand to my forehead.
The baby peeked round her skirts
trying to make me laugh
but I said my head hurt
and shut my eyes on her and coughed.
My mother kneeled
until her shape hid the whole world.
She buffed up my pillows as she held me.
‘Could you eat a lemon sole?’ she asked me.
It was her favourite
she would buy it as a treat for us.
I only liked the sound of it
slim, holy and expensive
but I said ‘Yes, I will eat it’
and I shut my eyes and sailed out
on the noise of sunlight, white sheets
and lemon sole softly being cut up.
A draught like a bony finger
felt under the door
but my father swung the coal scuttle
till the red cave of the fire roared
and the pine-spiced Christmas tree
shook out plumage of glass and tinsel.
The radio was on but ignored,
greeting ‘Children all around the world’
and our Co-op Christmas turkey
had gone astray in the postal system –
the headless, green-gibletted corpse
revolved in the sorting-room
its leftover flesh
never to be eaten.
Tomorrow’s potatoes rolled to the boil
and a chorister sang like a star
glowing by the lonely moon –
but he was not so far,
though it sounded like Bethlehem
and I was alone in the room
with the gold-netted sherry bottle
and wet black walnuts in a jar.
That violet-haired lady, dowager-
humped, giving herself so many
smiles, taut glittering smiles,
smiles that swallow the air in front of her,
smiles that cling to shop-mirrors
and mar their silvering, smiles
like a spider’s wrinklework
flagged over wasteland bushes –
she’s had so many nips and tucks,
so much mouse-delicate
invisible mending. Her youth
squeaks out of its prison –
the dark red bar of her mouth
opening and closing.
She wants her hair to look black,
pure black, so she strands it with violet,
copperleaf, burgundy, rust –
that violet-haired lady, dowager-
humped, giving herself
so many smiles, keeping the light on.
They fly
straight-necked and barely white
above the bruised stitching of clouds
above wind and the sound of storms
above the creak of the tundra
the howl of weather
the scatter
and wolfish gloom
of sleet icing their wings,
they come
on their strong-sheathed wings
looking at nothing
straight down a freezing current of light,
they might
astonish a sleepy pilot
tunnelling his route above the Arctic,
his instruments darken and wink
circling the swans
and through his dull high window at sunrise
he sees them
ski their freezing current of light
at twenty-seven thousand feet
past grey-barrelled engines
spitting out heat
across the flight of the swans,
and they’re gone
the polar current sleeking them down
as soon as he sees them.