Out of the Blue (11 page)

For all frozen things –

my middle finger that whitens

from its old, ten-minute frostbite,

for black, slimy potatoes

left in the clamp,

for darkness and cold like cloths

over the cage,

for permafrost, lichen crusts

nuzzled by reindeer,

the tender balance of decades

null as a vault.

For all frozen things –

the princess and princes

staring out of their bunker

at the original wind,

for
NATO
survivors in nuclear moonsuits

whirled from continent to continent

like Okies in bumpy Fords

fleeing the dustbowl.

For all frozen things –

snowdrops and Christmas roses

blasted down to the germ

of their genetic zip-code.

They fly by memory –

cargo of endless winter,

clods of celeriac, chipped

turnips, lanterns at ten a.m.

in the gloom of a Finnish market lace;

flowers under glass, herring,

little wizened apples.

For all frozen things –

the nipped fish in a mess of ice,

the uncovered galleon

tossed from four centuries of memory,

or nuclear snowsuits bouncing on dust,

trapped on the rough ride of the earth’s surface,

on the rough swing of its axis,

like moon-men lost on the moon

watching the earth’s green flush

tremble and perish.

Later my stepson will uncover a five-inch live shell

from a silted pool on the beach at St Côme. It is complete

with brass cap and a date on it: nineteen forty-three.

We’ll look it up in the dictionary, take it

to show at the Musée de la Libération

– ce petit obus – but once they unwrap it

they’ll drop the polite questions and scramble

full tilt for the Gendarmerie opposite.

The gendarmes will peer through its cradle of polythene

gingerly, laughing. One’s at the phone

already – he gestures – ‘Imagine! Let’s tell them

we’ve got a live shell here in the Poste!’

Of course this will have happened before.

They’ll have it exploded, there’ll be no souvenir shell-case,

and we’ll be left with our photographs

taken with a camera which turns out to be broken.

Later we’ll be at the Château Fontaine-Henry

watching sleek daughters in jodhpurs come in from the fields.

I’ll lie back in my green corduroy coat, and leave,

faint, to drive off through fields of sunflowers

without visiting the rooms we’ve paid for.

Madame will have her fausse-couche,

her intravenous injections, her glass ampoules,

in a room which is all bed

and smells of medicinal alcohol and fruit.

The children will play on the beach, a little forlornly,

in the wind which gusts up out of nowhere.

Later we’ll see our friends on their lightweight bicycles

freewheeling tiredly downhill to Asnelles.

Their little son, propped up behind them

will glide past, silent, though he alone sees us.

But now we are on the beach at Cabourg,

stopped on our walk to look where the sky’s whitening

over the sea beyond Dives. Now a child squawks

and races back as a wave slaps over his shorts’ hem

to where a tanned woman with naked breasts

fidgets her baby’s feet in the foam

straight down from the Boulevard Marcel Proust.

It’s not the four-wheeled drive crawler

spitting up dew and herbs,

not Dalapon followed by dressings

of dense phosphates,

nor ryegrass greening behind wire as behind glass,

not labourers wading in moonsuits

through mud gelded by paraquat –

but now, the sun-yellow, sky-blue

vehicles mount the pale chalk,

the sky bowls on the white hoops

and white breast of the roughland,

the farmer with Dutch eyes

guides forward the quick plough.

Now, flush after flush of Italian ryegrass

furs up the roughland

with its attentive, bright,

levelled-off growth –

pale monoculture

sweating off rivers of filth

fenced by the primary

colours of crawler and silo.

The land pensions, like rockets

shoot off from wheat with a soft yellow

flame-bulb: a rook or a man in black

flaps upwards with white messages.

On international mountains and spot markets

little commas of wheat translate.

The stony ground’s pumped to a dense fire

by the flame-throwing of chemicals.

On stony ground the wheat can ignite

its long furls.

The soft rocket of land pensions flies

and is seen in Japan, covering

conical hills with its tender stars:

now it is firework time, remembrance

and melt-down of autumn chrysanthemums.

On bruised fields above Brighton

grey mould laces the wheat harvest.

The little rockets are black. Land pensions

fasten on silos elsewhere, far off.

Market men flicker and skulk like eels

half-way across earth to breed.

On thin chipped flint-and-bone land

a nitrate river laces the grey wheat

pensioning off chalk acres.

Decoding a night’s dreams

of sheepless uplands

the wool-merchant clings to the wool churches,

to trade with the Low Countries,

to profitable, downcast

ladies swathed in wool sleeves

whose plump, light-suffused faces

gaze from the triptychs he worships.

Sheep ticks, maggoty tails and foot-rot

enter his tally of dense beasts, walking

with a winter’s weight on their backs

through stubborn pasture

they graze to a hairsbreadth.

From the turf of the Fire Hills

the wool-merchant trawls

sheep for the marsh markets.

They fill mist with their thin cries –

circular eddies, bemusing

the buyers of mutton

from sheep too wretched to fleece.

In the right angle of morning sunshine

the aerial photographer

shoots from the blue,

decodes a landscape

of sheepless uplands

and ploughed drove roads,

decodes the airstream, the lapis lazuli

coat for many compacted skeletons

seaming the chalk by the sea.

O engines

flying over the light, barren

as shuttles, thrown over a huge

woof

crossply

of hedgeless snail tracks,

you are so high,

you’ve felled the damp crevices

you’ve felled the boulder-strewn meadow

the lichen

the strong plum tree.

O engines

swaying your rubber batons

on pods, on ripe lupins,

on a chameleon terrace

of greenlessness,

you’re withdrawn from a sea

of harvests, you’re the foreshore

of soaked soil leaching

undrinkable streams.

The wood-pigeon rolls soft notes off its breast

in a tree which grows by a fence.

The smell of creosote,

easy as wild gum

oozing from tree boles

keeps me awake. A thunderstorm

heckles the air.

I step into a bedroom

pungent with child’s sleep,

and lift the potty and pile of picture books

so my large shadow

crosses his eyes.

Sometimes at night, expectant,

I think I see the shadow of my mother

bridge a small house of enormous rooms.

Here are white, palpable walls

and stories of my grandmother:

the old hours of tenderness I missed.

The rain was falling down in slow pulses

between the horse-chestnuts, as if it would set root there.

It was a slate-grey May evening

luminous with new leaves.

I was at a talk on the appearances of Our Lady

these past five years at Medjugorje.

We sat in a small room in the Presbytery:

the flow of the video scratched, the raindrop

brimmed its meniscus upon the window

from slant runnel to sill.

Later I watched a programme on air layering.

The round rootball steadied itself

high as a chaffinch nest, and then deftly

the gardener severed the new plant.

She knew its wounded stem would have made roots there.

It was too hot, that was the argument.

I had to walk a mile with my feet flaming

from brown sandals and sun.

Now the draggling shade of the privet made me to dawdle,

now soft tarmac had to be crossed.

I was lugging an old school-bag –

it was so hot the world was agape with it.

One limp rose fell as I passed.

An old witch sat in her front garden

under the spokes of a black umbrella

lashed to her kitchen chair.

God was in my feet as I fled past her.

Everyone I knew was so far away.

The yellow glob of my ice cream melted and spread.

I bought it with huge pennies, held up.

‘A big one this time!’ the man said,

so I ate on though it cloyed me.

It was for fetching the bread

one endless morning before Bank Holiday.

I was too young, that was the argument,

and had to propitiate everyone:

the man with the stroke, and the burnt lady

whose bared, magical teeth made me

smile if I could –

Oh the cowardice of my childhood!

The dry glasshouse is almost empty.

A few pungent geraniums with lost markings

lean in their pots.

It is nothing but a cropping place for sun

on cold Northumbrian July days.

The little girl, fresh from suburbia,

cannot believe in the peaches she finds here.

They are green and furry as monkeys –

she picks them and drops them.

All the same they are matched to the word peach

and must mean more than she sees. She will post them

unripe in a tiny envelope

to her eight-year-old class-mates, and write

carefully in the ruled-up spaces:

‘Where we are the place is a palace.’

The bald glasshouses stretch here for miles.

For miles air-vents open like wings.

This is the land of reflections, of heat

flagging from. mirror to mirror. Here cloches

force on the fruit by weeks, while pulses

of light run down the chain of glasshouses

and blind the visitors this Good Friday.

The daffodil pickers are spring-white.

Their neat heads in a fuzz of sun

stoop to the buds, make leafless

bunches of ten for Easter.

A white thumb touches the peat

but makes no print. This is the soil-less

Eden of glasshouses, heat-stunned.

Old Jeffery begins his night music.

The girls, sheathed in their brick skin,

giggle with terror. The boys are all gone

out to the world, ‘continually sinning’,

their graces exotic and paid for.

Old Jeffery rummages pitchforks

up the back chimney. The girls

open the doors to troops of exorcists

who plod back over the Isle of Axeholme

balked by the house. The scrimmage

of iron, shattering windows, and brickwork

chipped away daily is birdsong

morning and evening, or sunlight

into their unsunned lives.

Old Jeffery tires of the house slowly.

He knocks the back of the connubial bed

where nineteen Wesleys, engendered in artlessness

swarm, little ghosts of themselves.

The girls learn to whistle his music.

The house bangs like a side-drum

as Old Jeffery goes out of it. Daughters

in white wrappers mount to the windows, sons

coming from school make notes – the wildness

goes out towards Epworth and leaves nothing

but the bald house straining on tiptoe

after its ghost.