Out of the Blue (8 page)

At three in the morning

while mist limps between houses

while cloaks and blankets

dampen with dew

the bride sleeps with her husband

bundled in a red blanket,

her mouth parts and a bubble

of sour breathing goes free.

She humps wool up to her ears

while her husband tightens his arms

and rocks her, mumbling. Neither awakes.

In the second month of the marriage

the bride wakes after midnight.

Damp-bodied

she lunges from sleep

hair pricking with sweat

breath knocking her sides.

She eels from her husband's grip

and crouches, listening.

The night is enlarged by sounds.

The rain has started.

It threshes leaves secretively

and there in the blackness

of whining dogs it finds out the house.

Its hiss enfolds her, blots up

her skin, then sifts off, whispering

in her like mirrors

the length of the rainy village.

I remember years ago, that we had Christmas roses:

cold, greeny things under the snow –

fantastic hellebores, harbingers

of the century’s worst winter.

On little fields stitched over with drystone

we broke snow curds, our sledge

tossing us out at the wall.

For twelve years a plateau of sea

stopped at my parents’ window.

Here the slow Flatholm foghorn

sucking at the house fabric

recalls my little month-old brother,

kept in the house for weeks

while those snow days piled up like plates

to an impossible tower.

They were building the match factory

to serve moors seeded with conifers

that year of the Bay of Pigs,

the year of Cuba, when adults muttered

of taking to the moors with a shotgun

when the bomb dropped.

Such conversation, rapaciously

stored in a nine-year-old’s memory

breeds when I stare down Bridgwater Bay

to that glassy
CEGB
elegance, Hinkley

Point, treating the landscape like snow,

melting down marshes and long, lost

muddy horizons.

Fir thickets replace those cushions

of scratchy heather, and prick out the noise

of larks in the air, so constant

I never knew what it was.

Little hellebores with green veins,

not at all tender, and scentless

on frosty ground, with your own small

melt, your engine of growth:

that was the way I liked you.

I imagine you sent back from Africa

leaving a patchwork of rust and khaki

sand silt in your tea and your blood.

The metal of tanks and cans

puckers your taste-buds.

Your tongue jumps from the touch

of charge left in a dying battery.

You spread your cards in the shade

of roving lorries whose canvas

tents twenty soldiers.

The greased cards patter

in chosen spaces.

I imagine you sent back from Africa

with a tin mug kept for the bullet hole

in at one angle and out another.

You mount the train at the port

asking if anywhere on earth

offers such grey, mild people.

Someone draws down the blind.

You see his buttons, his wrist,

his teeth filled to the roots.

He weakens the sunlight for you

and keeps watch on your face.

Your day sinks in a hollow of sleep

racket and megaphoned voices.

The troop-ship booms once. Laden

with new men she moves down the Sound

low in the water, egg-carrying.

But for you daylight

with your relieved breath

supping up train dirt.

A jolt is a rescue from sleep

and a glaze of filth from the arm-rest

patches your cheek. You try to catch voices

calling out stations closer to home.

I've approached him since childhood,

since he was old, blurred,

my stake in the playground chants

and war games,

a word like ‘brother'

mixed with a death story.

Wearing shorts and a smile

he stayed in the photograph box.

His hair was receding early.

He had Grandpa's long lip and my mother's love.

The jungle obliterates a city

of cries and murmurs,

bloody discharges

and unsent telegrams.

Now he is immanent

breaking off thoughts

printing that roll of film

one sweaty evening,

Four decades

have raised a thicket of deaths around him

a fence of thorn and a fence of roses.

His mother, my grandmother,

his father, his brother,

his camp companions

his one postcard.

The circle closes

in skin, limbs

and new resemblances.

We wanted to bring him

through life with us

but he grows younger.

We've passed him

holding out arms.

The parachute packers with white faces

swathed over with sleep

and the stale bodily smell of sheets

make haste to tin huts where a twelve-hour

shift starts in ten minutes.

Their bare legs pump bicycle pedals,

they clatter on wooden-soled sandals

into the dazzling light over the work benches.

They rub in today’s issue of hand-cream.

Their fingers skim on the silk

as the unwieldy billows of parachute flatten

like sea-waves, oiled, folded in sevens.

The only silk to be had

comes in a military packaging:

dull-green, printed, discreet,

gone into fashioning parachutes

to be wondered at like the flowers’

down-spinning, seed-bearing canopies

lodged in the silt of village memory.

A girl pulling swedes in a field

senses the shadow of parachutes

and gapes up, knees braced

and hair tangling. She must be riddled,

her warm juices all spilled

for looking upwards too early

into the dawn, leafy with parachutes.

Heavenly wide canopies

bring down stolid chaps with their rifle butts

ready to crack, with papers

to govern the upturned land,

with boots, barbed wire and lists on fine paper

thousands of names long.

I look up now at two seagulls,

at cloud drifts and a lamp-post

bent like a feeding swan,

and at the sound of needles

seaming up parachutes in Nissen huts

with a hiss and pull through the stuff

of these celestial ball-dresses

for nuns, agents, snow-on-the-boots men

sewn into a flower’s corolla

to the music of
Workers’ Playtime
.

At dusk the parachute packers

release their hair from its nets

and ride down lanes whitened by cow-parsley

to village halls, where the dances

and beer and the first cigarettes

expunge the clouds of parachute silk

and rules touching their hair and flesh.

In the bar they’re the girls who pack parachutes

for our boys. They can forget

the coughs of the guard on duty,

the boredom and long hours

and half-heard cries of caught parachutists.

After midday the great lazy

slaps of the sea,

the whistling of a boy who likes the empty

hour while the beach is feeding,

the cliffs vacant, gulls untidily drowsing

far out on the water.

I walked on in the dazzle

round to the next cove

where the sea was running backwards like mercury

from people busy at cutting

windows in the side of a beached porpoise.

The creature had died recently.

Naturally its blood was mammalian,

its skin supple and tough; it made me

instantly think of uses for it –

shoe soling, sealing the hulls of boats –

something to explain the intent knives

and people swiftly looking at me.

But there was no mussel harvest on the rocks

or boat blinding through noon

out to the crab pots,

not here but elsewhere the settled

stupor of digestion went on.

The porpoise had brought the boys between fourteen and eighteen,

lengthened their lives by a burning

profitless noon-time,

so they cut windows out of surprise

or idleness, finding the thing here

like a blank wall, inviting them.

They jumped from its body, prodded it,

looked in its mouth and its eyes,

hauled up its tail like a child’s drawing

and became serious.

Each had the use of the knife in turn

and paused over the usual graffiti

to test words first with a knife-point

and fit the grey boulder of flesh under them.

Clapping their wings the gulls came back from the sea,

the pink screens of the hotel opened,

the last boy scoured the knife with sand.

I walked back along the shingle

breathing away the bloody trail of the porpoise

and saw the boys’ wet heads glittering,

their hooting, diving

bodies sweeping them out of the bay.

For three years I’ve been wary of deep water.

I busied myself on the shore

towelling, handing out underwear

wading the baby knee-high.

I didn’t think I had forgotten

how to play in the deep water,

but it was only today I went there

passing the paddle boats and bathers,

the parallel harbour wall,

until there was no one at all but me

rolling through the cold water

and scarcely bothering to swim

from pure buoyancy.

Of course I could still see them:

the red and the orange armbands,

the man smiling and pointing seawards,

the tender faces.

It’s these faces that have taken me

out of the deep water

and made my face clench like my mother’s

once, as I pranced on a ten-foot

wall over a glass-house.

The water remembers my body,

stretched and paler as it is.

Down there is my old reflection

spread-eagled, steadily moving.

Now the snowdrop, the wood-anemone, the crocus

have flowered

and faded back to dry, scarcely-seen threads,

Lady Macduff goes down to the meadow

where primrose flowers are thickening.

Her maid told her this morning, It’s time

to pick them now, there will never be more

without some dying.

Even the kitchen girls, spared for an hour,

come to pick flowers for wine.

The children’s nurse has never seemed to grasp

that she only need lay down the flowers loosely,

the flat-bottomed baskets soon fill

with yellow, chill primroses covered by sturdy leaves,

but the nurse will weave posies

even though the children are impatient

and only care who is first, has most

of their mother’s quick smile.

Pasties have been brought from the castle.

Savoury juices spill from their ornate crusts,

white cloths are smeared with venison gravy

and all eat hungrily

out in the spring wind.

Lady Macduff looks round at the sparkling

sharpness of grass, whipped kerchiefs and castle battlements

edged with green light

and the primroses like a fall

colder than rain, warmer than snow,

petals quite still, hairy stems helplessly curling.

She thinks how they will be drunk

as yellow wine, swallow by swallow

filling the pauses of mid-winter,

sweet to raw throats.

In the weightlessness of time and our passage within it

voices and rooms swim.

Cleft after soft cleft

parts, word-covered lips

thin as they speak.

I should recall how pink and tender

your lids looked when you read too long

while I produced seamed

patchwork, my own phantom.

Am I the jury, the evidence,

the recollection?

Last night I dreamed of a prospect

and so I dreamed backwards:

first I woke in the dark

scraping my knuckles on board and mould.

I remember half listening

or reading in the shadow of a fire;

each evening I would lie quietly

breathing the scent of my flesh till I slept.

I loved myself in my new dress.

I loved the coral stems rising from the rosebush

under my window in March.

I was intact, neat,

dressing myself each morning.

I dreamed my little baby was alive,

mewing for me from somewhere in the room.

I chafed her feet and tucked her nightdress close.

Claire, Shelley and I left England.

We crossed the Channel and boasted afterwards

of soaked clothes, vomit and cloudbursts.

We went by grey houses, shutters still closed,

people warmly asleep. My eyes were dazed

wide open in abatement and vacancy.

*

  
A bad wife is like winter in the house
.

         (diary of Claire Clairmont, Florence 1820)

In Florence in winter grit scoured between houses;

the plaster needed replacing, the children had coughs.

I lived in a nursery which smelled of boredom and liniment.

In bed I used to dream of water crossings

by night. I looked fixedly forward.

It was the first winter I became ugly:

I was unloving all winter,

frozen by my own omens.

In Lerici I watched small boats on the bay

trace their insect trails on the flat water.

Orange lamps and orange blossom

lit and suffused the night garden.

Canvas slashed in a squall.

Stifling tangles of sail and fragile

masts snapping brought the boat over.

The blackened sea

kept its waves still, then tilting

knocked you into its cold crevices.

I was pressed to a pinpoint,

my breath flat.

Scarcely pulsating

I gave out nothing.

I gave out nothing before your death.

We would pass in the house with blind-lipped

anger in me.

You put me aside for the winter.

I would soften like a season

I would moisten and turn to you.

I would not conform my arms to the shapes of dead children.

I patched my babies and fed them

but death got at them.

Your eyes fed everywhere.

I wonder at bodies once clustered,

at delicate tissue

emerging unable to ripen.

Each time I returned to life

calmer than the blood which left me

weightless as the ticking of a blind-cord.

Inside my amply-filled dress

I am renewed seamlessly.

Fledged in my widow’s weeds

I was made over, for this

prickle of live flesh

wedged in its own corpulence.