Out of the Blue (12 page)

Preaching at Gwennap, silk

ribbons unrolling far off,

the unteachable turquoise and green

coast dropping far off,

preaching at Gwennap, where thermals revolve

to the bare lip, where granite

breaks its uneasy backbone,

where a great natural theatre, cut

to a hairsbreadth, sends back each cadence,

preaching at Gwennap to a child asleep

while the wide plain murmurs, and prayers

ply on the void, tendered like cords

over the pit’s brim.

                              Off to one side

a horse itches and dreams. Its saddle

comes open, stitch after stitch,

while the tired horse, standing for hours

flicks flies from its arse

and eats through the transfiguration –

old sobersides

mildly eschewing more light.

The mare with her short legs heavily mud-caked

plods, her head down

over the unearthly grasses,

the burning salt-marshes,

through sharp-sided marram and mace

with the rim of the tide’s eyelid

out to the right.

The reed-cutters go home

whistling sharply, crab-wise

beneath their dense burdens,

the man on the mare weighs heavy, his broadcloth

shiny and wom, his boots dangling

six inches from ground.

He clenches his buttocks to ease them,

shifts Bible and meat,

thinks of the congregation

gathered beyond town,

wind-whipped, looking for warm

words from his dazed lips.

No brand from the burning;

a thick man with a day’s travel

caked on him like salt,

a preacher, one of those scattered like thistle

from the many-angled home chapel

facing all ways on its slabbed upland.

The long arm hangs flat to his lap.

The relaxed wrist-joint is tender, shade-

cupped at the base of the thumb.

That long, drab line of American cloth,

those flat brows knitting a crux,

the close-shaven scalp, cheeks, jawbone and lips

rest in abeyance here, solid impermanence

like the stopped breath of a runner swathed up

in tinfoil bodybag, back from the front.

He rests, coloured like August foliage and earth

when the wheat’s cropped, and the massive harvesters

go out on hire elsewhere,

his single-lens perspex eyeswield pushed up, denting

the folds of his skull stubble, his cap

shading his eyes which are already shaded

by bone. His pupils are shuttered,

the lenses widening inwards,

notions of a paling behind them.

Dense slabs of braided-up lupins –

someone’s embroidery – Nan,

liking the blue,

one more for the beautiful table

with roses and handkerchiefs, seams

on the web of fifty five-year-olds’ life-spans.

New, tough little stitches

run on the torn

wedding head-dresses.

No one can count them

back to the far-off

ghosts of the children’s conceptions.

Those party days:

one more for the beautiful table

the extinction of breath in a sash.

What looks and surprises!

Nan on her bad legs

resumes the filminess of petals

and quotes blood pricks and blood stains

faded to mauve and to white and to crisp

brown drifts beneath bare sepals –

look, they have washed out.

That’s better, he says, he says

that’s better
.

Dense slabs of braided-up lupins –

someone’s embroidery – Nan,

liking the blue,

Oh you’re a tinker, that’s what you are,

a little tinker, a tinker, that’s what you are
.

One more for the beautiful table

with roses and handkerchiefs, seams

on the web of fifty five-year-olds’ life-spans.

Come on now, come on, come on now
,

come on, come on, come on now
,

new tough little stitches

run on the torn

wedding head-dresses.

The children count them

back to the far-off

ghosts of their own conceptions.

Oh you like that, I know, yes,

you kick those legs, you kick them,

you kick those fat legs then
.

Those party days

one more for the beautiful table

set out in the hall.

You mustn’t have any tears, you’re my good boy

aren’t you my little good boy
.

What looks and surprises!

Nan on her bad legs

resumes the filminess of petals,

she’ll leave it to Carlie

her bad spice.

Let’s wipe those tears, let’s wipe off all those tears.

That’s better, he says, he says

that’s right
.

She quotes blood pricks and bloodstains

faded to mauve and to white and to crisp

brown drifts beneath bare sepals –

look, they have washed out.

The green recording light falters

as if picking up voices

it’s pure noise grain and nothing more human.

It’s all right lambkin I’ve got you I’ve got you
.

The grass looks different in another country.

By a shade more or a shade less, it startles

as love does in the sharply-tinged landscape

of sixteen to eighteen. When it is burnt

midsummer and lovers have learned to make love

with scarcely a word said, then they see nothing

but what is closest: an eyelash tonight,

the slow spread of a sweat stain,

the shoe-sole of the other as he walks off

watched from the mattress.

The top deck of the bus babbles with diplomats’

children returning from school, their language

an overcast August sky which can’t clear.

Each syllable melting to static

troubles the ears of strangers, no stranger

but less sure than the stick-limbed children.

With one silvery, tarnishing ring between them

they walk barefoot past the Martello tower

at Sandymount, and wish the sea clearer,

the sun for once dazzling, fledged

from its wet summer nest of cloud-strips.

They make cakes of apple peel and arrowroot

and hear the shrieks of bold, bad seven-year-old Seamus

who holds the pavement till gone midnight

for all his mother’s forlorn calling.

The freedom of no one related for thousands of miles,

the ferry forever going backward and forward

from rain runnel to drain cover…

The grass looks different in another country,

sudden and fresh, waving, unfurling

the last morning they see it, as they go down

to grey Dún Laoghaire by taxi.

They watch the slate rain coming in eastward

pleating the sea not swum in,

blotting the Ballsbridge house with its soft sheets

put out in the air to sweeten.

‘Has she gone then?’ they asked,

stepping round the back of the house

whose cat skulked in the grass.

She’d left pegs dropped in the bean-row,

and a mauve terrycloth babygrow

stirred on the line as I passed.

Her damsons were ripe and her sage was in flower,

her roses tilted from last night’s downpour,

her sweetpeas and sunflowers leaned anywhere.

‘She got sick of it, then,’ they guessed,

and wondered if the torn-up paper

might be worth reading, might be a letter.

‘It was the bills got her,’ they knew,

seeing brown envelopes sheared with the white

in a jar on the curtainless windowsill,

some of them sealed still, as if she was through

with trying to pay, and would sit, chilled,

ruffling and arranging them like flowers

in the long dusks while the kids slept upstairs.

The plaster was thick with her shadows,

damp and ready to show

how she lived there and lay fallow

and how she stood at her window

and watched tall pylons stride down the slope

sizzling faintly, stepping away

as she now suddenly goes,

too stubborn to be ghosted at thirty.

She will not haunt here. She picks up her dirty

warm children and takes them

down to the gate which she lifts as it whines

and sets going a thin cry in her.

He was hard-hearted and no good to her

they say now, grasping the chance to be kind.

The sea’s a featureless blaze.

On photographs nothing comes out

but glare, with that scarlet-rimmed fishing boat

far-off, lost to the lens.

At noon a stiff-legged tourist in shorts

steps, camera poised. He’s stilted

as a flamingo, pink-limbed.

Icons of Malta gather around him.

He sweats as a procession passes

and women with church-dark faces

brush him as if he were air.

He holds a white crocheted dress

to give to his twelve-year-old daughter

who moons in the apartment, sun-sore.

The sky’s tight as a drum, hard

to breathe in, hard to walk under.

He would not buy ‘bikini for daughter’

though the man pressed him, with plump fingers

spreading out scraps of blue cotton.

Let her stay young, let her know nothing.

Let her body remain skimpy and sudden.

His wife builds arches of silence over her

new breasts and packets of tampons marked ‘slender’.

At nights, when they think she’s asleep,

they ache in the same places

but never louder than a whisper.

He watches more women melt into a porch.

Their white, still laundry flags from window to window

while they are absent, their balconies blank.

At six o’clock, when he comes home and snicks

his key in the lock so softly neither will catch it

he hears one of them laugh.

They are secret in the kitchen, talking of nothing,

strangers whom anyone might love.

Snowdrops, Mary’s tapers,

barely alight in the grey shadows,

Candlemas in a wet February,

the soil clodded and frostless,

the quick blue shadows of snowlight again missed.

The church candles’ mass

yellow as mothering bee cells,

melts to soft puddles of wax,

the snowdrops, with crisp ruffs

and green spikes clearing the leaf debris

are an unseen nebula

caught by a swinging telescope,

white tapers

blooming in structureless dusk.

Let us think that we are pilgrims

in furs on this bleak water.

The
Titanic
’s lamps hang on its sides like fruit

on lit cliffs. We’re shriven for rescue.

The sea snaps at our caulking.

We bend to our oars and praise God

and flex our fingers to bring

a drowned child out from the tarpaulin.

We’re neither mothers nor fathers, but children,

fearful and full of trust,

lamblike as the
Titanic
goes down

entombing its witnesses.

We row on in a state of grace

in our half-empty lifeboats, sailing

westward for America, pilgrims,

numb to the summer-like choir

of fifteen hundred companions.

On smooth buttercup fields

the potholers sink down like dreams

close to Roman lead-mining country.

I sink the leafless shaft of an hydrangea twig

down through the slippy spaces I’ve made for it.

Dusted with hormone powder, moist,

its fibrous stem splays into root.

I graze the soft touches of compost

and wash them off easily, balled

under the thumb – clean dirt.

There’s the man who gave me my Irish name

still going down, wifeless, that miner

who shafted the narrow cuffs of the earth

as if it was this he came for.