Out of the Blue (16 page)

You came back to life in its sweetness,

to keen articulations of the knee joint,

to slow replays of balls kicking home

and the gape of the goalkeeper.

You came back to life in its sweetness,

to the smell of sweat, the night-blue

unwrinkling of the iris,

and going from table to table at parties.

Perhaps you’ll waltz

on some far-off anniversary

with an elderly woman

who doesn’t exist yet,

and you, you’ll forget,

for now we’re counting in years,

where we were counting in hours.

Deep in busy lizzies and black iron

he sleeps for the Heimat,

and his photograph slips in and out of sight

as if breathing.

There are petals against his cheeks

but he is not handsome.

His small eyes search the graveyard fretfully

and the flesh of his cheeks clouds

the bones of heroism.

No one can stop him being young

and he is so tired of being young.

He would like to feel pain in his joints

as he wanders down to Hübers,

but he’s here as always,

always on his way back from the photographer’s

in his army collar

with a welt on his neck rubbed raw.

The mountains are white and sly as they always were.

Old women feed the graveyard with flowers,

clear the glass on his photograph

with chamois leathers,

bend and whisper the inscription.

They are his terrible suitors.

Here I am in the desert knowing nothing,

here I am knowing nothing

in the desert of knowing nothing,

here I am in this wide

desert long after midnight

here I am knowing nothing

hearing the noise of the rain

and the melt of fat in the pan

here is our man on the phone knowing something

and here’s our man fresh from the briefing

in combat jeans and a clip microphone

testing for sound,

catching the desert rain, knowing something,

here’s the general who’s good with his men

storming the camera, knowing something

in the pit of his Americanness

here’s the general taut in his battledress

and knowing something

here’s the boy washing his kit in a tarpaulin

on a front-line he knows from his GCSE

coursework on Wilfred Owen

and knowing something

here is the plane banking,

the    
go
    
go
    
go
     of adrenalin

the child melting

and here’s the grass that grows overnight

from the desert rain, feeling for him

and knowing everything

and here I am knowing nothing

in the desert of knowing nothing

dry from not speaking.

They are hiding away in the desert,

hiding in sand which is growing warm

with the hot season,

they are hiding from bone-wagons

and troops in protective clothing

who will not look at them,

the crowds were appalled on seeing him,

so disfigured did he look

that he seemed no longer human
.

That killed head straining through the windscreen

with its frill of bubbles in the eye-sockets

is not trying to tell you something –

it is telling you something.

Do not look away,

permit them, permit them –

they are telling their names to the Marines

in one hundred thousand variations,

but no one is counting,

do not turn away,

for God is counting

all of us who are silent

holding our newspapers up, hiding.

That morning when the potato tops rusted,

the mangle rested and the well ran dry

and the turf house leaned like a pumpkin

against the yellow sky

there was a fire lit in the turf house

and a thin noise of crying,

and under the skinny sheets a woman

wadded with cloth against bleeding.

That morning her man went to the fields

after a shy pause at the end of her bed,

trying not to pick out the smell of her blood,

but she turned and was quiet.

All day the yellow sky walked on the turves

and she thought of things heavy to handle,

her dreams sweated with burdens,

the bump and grind of her mangle.

All day the child creaked in her cradle

like a fire as it sinks

and the woman crooned when she was able

across the impossible inches.

At that moment at the horizon there came a horseman

pressed to the saddle, galloping, galloping

fast as the whoop of an ambulance siren –

and just as unlikely. What happened

was slower and all of a piece.

She died. He lived (the man in the fields),

the child got by on a crust

and lived to be thirty, with sons. In the end

we came to be born too. Just.

The Our Father, the moment of fear.

He dodged round us and ran,

but was fetched back again

to stand before us on the platform.

The Our Father, the moment of fear

as the fist gripped and he hung

from the headmaster’s arm,

doubling on the spot like a rabbit

blind for home.

The Our Father, the moment of fear.

The watch he’d stolen was given

back to its owner, dumb

in the front row, watching the strapping.

The Our Father, the moment of fear.

The strap was old and black and it cracked

on belly buttock and once across his lip

because he writhed and twisted.

He would not stand and take it.

The Our Father, the moment of fear.

There was a lot of sun

leaking through churchy windows

onto a spurt of urine.

After an age of watching

we sang the last hymn.

This path is silky with dust

where a lizard balances across bracken fronds

and a brown butterfly opens wide

to the stroke of the sun,

where a trawler feels its way along the sandbanks

and two yachts, helplessly paired, tack far out

like the butterflies which have separated and gone quiet.

A wild damson tree bulges with wasps

among heaps that are not worth picking,

and there a branch splits white with the lightning

of too heavy a harvest.

The lizard is gone in a blink.

Its two-pronged tail – half withered, half growing –

flicks out of the sun.

For a moment the pulse in its throat

keeps the grass moving.

A grass-bound offering of yarrow,

rosebay willow herb and veined convolvulus

lies to one side of the path

as if someone’s coming back.

Instead, the sift of the dust –

beneath the bracken these hills are full of adders.

In the white sheets I gave you

everything I am capable of –

at the wrong time

of the month we opened

to the conception,

you were dewed like a plum

when at two a.m.

you reached under the bed

for a drink of water adrift

in yesterday’s clothes,

our sheets were a rope

caught between our thighs,

we might easily have died

but we kept on climbing.

The white receiver

slides up my vagina,

I turn and you’ve come,

though I’m much too old for this

and you’re much too young.

That’s the baby

says the radiographer.

You are eight millimetres long

and pulsing,

bright in the centre of my much-used womb

which to my astonishment

still looks immaculate.

You are all heart,

I watch you tick and tick

and wonder

what you will come to,

will this be our only encounter

in the white gallery of ultrasound

or are you staying?

One day will we talk about this

moment when I first saw your spaceship

far off, heading for home?

She swam to me smiling, her teeth

pointed by salt water, her mouth

a rock-pool’s spat-out wine gum,

and then the tide flung

over her threshold,

and her lips moved.

The valve of her mouth was plumed

with salt-sweet tendrils,

sea danced from her pelt

of oil and muscle,

she rested her elbows on my pedalo

and there she hung

browning the pads of her shoulders

like a snake in the sun.

On shore thunderhead pines

drifted and swelled

like August umbrellas

stunning the fronts of hotels.

The sharp tide rinsed

over her threshold

as she dived once

and an angler cast

with lightning-proof rod

from the crinkled rocks.

A slow Medusa tilted beneath her,

shadowing toes and ankles

then on with its belly to the south,

braille on its tentacles.

She could read it like a newspaper

as it hunted alongside her.

I shivered

at the roll of her syllables,

and her joined feet winnowing,

and so I trawled her with me

over a shallow forest of dog-jawed

fruit sucking the trees,

past angler-fish socketing sand

with stone-cold faces,

through shrimps which divided between them

her armpit crevices

then flicked that way and this

tasting the dew of her breasts.

I trawled her past innocent sand

and the spumy outstretched arms

of agar and tangle –

but no, I wouldn’t look down

however she called to me

until my fingers were shrunk

like old laundry.

I did not dare look down

to be snagged by ruby and seal-black

trees relaxing their weave.

On shore nobody’s waiting.

The children, firm and delicious

as morning goods, have sheathed up their spades.

The boy with burned legs

has stepped out of his pantaloons

and skips in his blue vest

on the verandah boards.

The big one lights a mosquito candle,

Dad fills his glass of wine

four times, while they count,

and crickets saw in the ditch, frantic

along with the old car number-plate

and the boys’ jar of fishing maggots.

They are screeching, all of them:

night, night, night’s come

and no one’s ever had a pedalo out this long
.

Night-wind sifts on the shore

where striped recliners and wind-breaks

squeak by the green pavilion

crying for more.

I’ve lost my wife to the sea

Dad thinks hazily,

and takes another bottle of Muscadet

out of the gas cooler,

he imagines her dreaming

and sleeping miles from him,

each breath takes her farther,

toes in the air,

sea claps under her pedalo

impudently happy –

Below me now a mirror of wave-ruts

in firm brown sand,

I’d pulled her with me for miles

and there was nowhere to hide.

Now let me see you swim back

I said. She was mouthing

like mackerel tossed in a bucket

when the man’s too busy to kill it,

with her scale-lapped bathing-hat

fly-blown and crazing.

She had nothing on underneath.

She was bare and bald as an eel.

             Now she was an old bathing-woman

             a mackintoshed marine Venus,

             now she was that girl with lipstick

             a push-up bra and a beehive,

             now she was a slippery customer at Cannes

             bare-breasted and young,

             now she was my old

             familiar snake again.

I took her curls in my hands and I pulled

but they were limpetted, smiling,

and there were just the two of us rocking.

We were close as spies

and she stayed silent

till day dived after its horizon

and the sea rustled with moonlight.

Swell shuts and opens

like a throat,

she claps

under my pedalo

impudently happy.

Where are you now

my sister, my spouse?

Clap with one hand

or clap to nothing –

I know you can.

Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth

my sister, my spouse.

The pedalo rocks

and is still again.