Out of the Blue (6 page)

Where have you gone

small child,

the damson bloom

on your eyes

the still heap

of your flesh

lightly composed

in a grey shawl,

your skull’s pulse

stains you,

the veins slip deep.

Two lights burn

at the mouth of the cave

where the air’s thin

and the tunnels boom

with your slippery blood.

Your unripe cheeks cling

to the leaves, to the wall,

your grasp unpeels

and your bruises murmur

while blueness clouds

on the down of your eyes,

your tears erode

and your smile files

through your lips like a soldier

who shoots at the sky

and you flash up in silver;

where are you now

little one,

peeled almond,

damson bloom?

It’s past nine and breakfast is over.

With morning frost on my hands I cross

the white grass, and go nowhere.

It’s icy: domestic. A grain

of coffee burns my tongue. Its heat

folds into the first cigarette.

The garden and air are still.

I am a stone and the world falls from me.

I feel untouchable – a new planet

where life knows it isn’t safe to begin.

From silver flakes of ash I shape

a fin and watch it with anguish.

I hear apples rolling above me;

November twigs; a bare existence –

my sister is a marvellous

dolphin, flanking her young.

Her blood flushes her skin

but mine is trapped. Occasional moments

allow me to bathe in their dumb sweetness.

My loose pips ripen. My night subsides

rushing, like the long glide of an owl.

Raw peace. A pale, frost-lit morning.

The black treads of my husband on the lawn

as he goes from the house to the loft

                                laying out apples.

In a back garden I’m painting

the outside toilet in shell and antelope.

The big domestic bramley tree

hangs close to me, rosy and leafless.

Sometimes an apple thumps

into the bushes I’ve spattered with turpentine

while my brush moves with a suck

over the burnt-off door frame.

Towels from the massage parlour

are out on the line next door:

all those bodies sweating into them

each day – the fabric stiffening –

towels bodiless and sex over.

I load the brush with paint again

and I hear myself breathing.

Sun slips off the wall

so the yard is cool

and lumbered with shadows,

and then a cannonade of apples

punches the wall and my arms,

the ripe stripes on their cheeks fall open,

flesh spurts and the juices fizz and glisten.

The slowly moving river in summer

where bulrushes, mallow and water forget-me-not

slip to their still faces.

A child's body

joins their reflections,

his plastic boat

drifts into midstream

and though I lean down to

brown water that smells of peppermint

I can't get at it:

my willow branch flails and pushes the boat outwards.

He smiles quickly

and tells me it doesn't matter;

my feet grip in the mud

and mash blue flowers under them.

Then we go home

masking with summer days the misery

that has haunted a whole summer.

I think once of the Egyptian woman

who drew a baby from the bulrushes

hearing it mew in the damp

odrorous growth holding its cradle.

There's nothing here but the boat

caught by its string

and through this shimmering day I struggle

drawn down by the webbed

years, the child's life cradled within.

So, how decisive a house is:

quilted, a net of blood and green

droops on repeated actions at nightfall.

A bath run through the wall

comforts the older boy sleeping

meshed in the odours of breath and Calpol

while in the maternity hospital

ancillaries rinse out the blood bottles;

the feel and the spore

of babies’ sleep stays here.

Later, some flat-packed plastic

swells to a parachute of oxygen

holding the sick through their downspin,

now I am well enough, I

iron, and place the folded sheets in bags

from which I shall take them, identical,

after the birth of my child.

And now the house closes us,

                                close on us,

like fruit we rest in its warm branches

and though it’s time for the child to come

nobody knows it, the night passes

while I sleepwalk the summer heat.

Months shunt me and I bring you

like an old engine hauling the blue

spaces that flash between track and train time.

Mist rises, smelling of petrol’s

burnt offerings, new born,

oily and huge, the lorries drum

on Stokes’ Croft,

out of the bathroom mirror the sky

is blue and pale as a Chinese mountain.

and I breathe in.

It’s time to go now. I take nothing

but breath, thinned.

A blown-out dandelion globe

might choose my laundered body to grow in.

Patrick, I cannot write

such poems for you as a father might

coming upon your smile,

your mouth half sucking, half sleeping,

your tears shaken from your eyes like sparklers

break up the nightless weeks of your life:

lighthearted, I go to the kitchen

and cook breakfast, aching as you grow hungry.

Mornings are plain as the pages

of books in sedentary schooldays.

If I were eighty and lived next door

hanging my pale chemises on the porch

would I envy or pity my neighbour?

Polished and still as driftwood

she stands smoothing her dahlias;

liquid, leaking,

I cup the baby’s head to my shoulder:

the child’s a boy and will not share

one day these obstinate, exhausted mornings.

The other babies were more bitter than you

Patrick, with your rare, tentative cry,

your hours of steep, snuffing the medical air.

Give me time for your contours, your fierce drinking.

Like land that has been parched for half a summer

and smiles, sticky with feeding

I have examined and examined you

at midnight, at two days; I have accompanied you

to the blue world on another floor of the hospital

where half-formed babies open their legs like anemones

and nurses, specialised as astronauts,

operate around the apnoea pillows.

But here you bloomed. You survived,

sticky with nectar. X-rayed, clarified,

you came back, dirty and peaceful.

And now like sunflowers settling their petals

for the last strokes of light in September

your eyes turn to me at 3 a.m.

You meet my stiff, mucousy face

and snort, beating your hand on my breast

as one more feed flows through the darkness, timed

to nothing now but the pull of your mouth.

Cool as sleep, the crates ring.

Birds stir and my milk stings me;

you slip my grasp. I never find you

in dreams – only your mouth

not crying

your sleep still pressing on mine.

The carpets shush. The house back silences.

I turn with you, wide-lipped

blue figure

into the underground of babies

and damp mothers fumbling at bras

and the first callus grows on us

weaned from your night smiles.

Now I write off a winter of growth.

First, hands batting the air,

forehead still smeared,

– now, suddenly, he stands there

upright and rounded as a tulip.

The garden sparkles through the windows.

Dark and a heap in my arms;

the thermostat clicking all night.

Out in the road beached cars and winter

so cold five minutes would finish you.

Light fell in its pools

each evening. Tranquilly

it stamped the same circles.

Friends shifted their boots on the step.

Their faces gleamed from their scarves

that the withdrawal of day

brought safety.

Experience so stitched, intimate,

mutes me.

Now I’m desperate for solitude.

The house enrages me.

I go miles, pushing the pram,

thinking about Christina Rossetti’s

black dresses – my own absent poems.

I go miles, touching his blankets proudly,

drawing the quilt to his lips.

I write of winter and the approaches to winter.

Air clings to me, rotten Lord Derbies,

patched in their skins, thud down.

The petals of Michaelmas daisies give light.

Now I’m that glimpsed figure for children

occupying doorways and windows;

that breath of succulence

ignored till nightfall.

I go out before the curtains are drawn

and walk close to the windows

which shine secretly.

Bare to the street

red pleats of a lampshade expose

bodies in classic postures, arguing.

Their senseless jokes explode with saliva.

I mop and tousle.

It’s three o’clock in the cul-de-sac.

Out of the reach of traffic,

free from the ply

of bodies glancing and crossing,

the shopping, visiting,

cashing orders at the post office,

I lie on my bed in the sun

drawing down streams of babble.

This room holds me, a dull

round bulb stubbornly

rising year after year in the same place.

In the chemist’s at night-time

swathed counters and lights turned down

lean and surround us.

Waiting for our prescriptions

we clock these sounds:

a baby’s peaked hush,

hawked breath.

I pay a pound

and pills fall in my curled palms.

Holding their white packages tenderly

patients track back to the pain.

‘Why is the man shouting?’ Oliver asks me.

I answer, ‘He wants to go home.’

Softly, muffled by cloth

the words still come

and the red-streaked drunkard goes past us,

rage scalding us.

I would not dare bring happiness

into the chemist’s at night-time.

Its gift-wrapped lack of assistance still presses

as suffering closes the blinded windows.

This evening clouds darken the street quickly,

more and more grey

flows throngh the yellowing treetops,

traffic flies downhill

roaring and spangled with faces,

full buses

rock past the Sussex Place roundabout.

In Sussex the line of Downs

has no trees to uncover,

no lick of the town's wealth, blue

in smoke, no gold, fugitive dropping.

In villages old England

checks rainfall, sick of itself.

Here there are scraps and flashes:

bellying food smells – last-minute buying –

plantain, quarters of ham.

The bread shop lady pulls down

loaves that will make tomorrow's cheap line.

On offer are toothpaste and shoe soles

mended same day for Monday's interview

and a precise network of choices

for old women collecting their pension

on Thursday, already owing the rent man.

Some places are boarded. You lose your expectancy –

soon it appears you never get home. Still

it's fine on evenings and in October

to settle here. Still the lights splashing look beautiful.

My nephews with almond faces

black hair like bunces of grapes

         (the skin stroked and then bruised

         the head buried and caressed)

he takes his son’s head in his hands

kisses it     blesses it     leaves it:

the boy with circles under his eyes like damsons

not the blond baby, the stepson.

In the forest stories about the black

father     the jew     the incubus

if there are more curses they fall on us.

Behind the swinging ropes of their isolation

my nephews wait, sucking their sweets.

The hall fills quickly and neatly.

If they keep still as water

    I’ll know them.

I look but I can’t be certain:

my nephews with heavy eyelids

blowing in the last touches of daylight

my sisters raising them up like torches.