Out of the Blue (2 page)

When my grandmother died my father eulogised her.

There she was, coming home with the pram

and her crowd of children

when something strange in the light

or its impediment getting at her from heaven

made her look up to see one of her children –

her eldest child, her son, him –

up on the roof, riding the horse of the homestead

with wild heels, daring her to defy him

and get him down. She got him down

with a word, as he remembers it,

her lovely penny-pale face looking up at his

from the path where her children swarmed and shouted

and it was this

he remembered when her coffin lay under his hands:

the roof, and his coming down.

When our priest died I remembered him

up on the roof, mending a tile

– a little job on hand, and a hammer

and air of busyness to keep him busy

while he pretended not to be pretending

to ride the roof in its wild beauty

over the unfamilied air of Liscannor

and half-way to America. Maybe.

Or maybe merely tapping the tile in

like a good workman.

‘How beautiful it was up on the roof,’

he said to the people at Mass.

My father touched his mother’s coffin

and did not say how golden her hair was.

Even I remember how golden it was

when the grey knot was undone.

Now they are gone into the ground,

both of them. They are riding on the roof,

their wild heels daring us to defy them,

and we are here on the ground

penny-pale and gaping.

They will not tell

how beautiful it is. I will not ask them.

Walking at all angles

to where the sky ends,

wantons with crane-yellow necks

and scarlet legs

stepping eastward, big eyes

supping the horizon.

Watch them as they go, the giraffes

breast-high to heaven,

herding the clouds.

Only Hull has enough sky for them.

This is Jacob's drum

how he beats on it     how he fights on it

how he splits every crack of the house

how he booms

how he slams

hair wet-feathered     sweat gathering

red-face Jacob throwing his money down

all on the drum     his one number

beating     repeating

O Jacob

don't let go of it

don't let anyone take your drum

don't let anyone of all of them

who want you to be drumless

beating your song on nothing

Jacob     they'd do it

believe them

it's time     they say

to put your drum away

do you remember the glow-worm Jacob?

how we looked and nearly touched it

but you didn't want to hurt it?

I thought it was electric

some trash a child dropped

some flake of neon

stuck to a rock

don't put your finger on the light

you said     and I stood still then

glow-worm
     Jacob     remember it

I had the word but it was you

who told me it was living

and now I say to anyone

don't touch Jacob's drum

O that old cinema of memory

with the same films always showing.

The censor has been at work again.

Is he protecting me, or am I protecting him?

This trailer’s a horror, I won’t watch it,

this one makes my heart burn with longing,

this is a mist of interrupted shapes

urgently speaking, just out of earshot –

experimental, I call it.

The projectionist should be on double time.

He’s got a kid in with him, they’re so bored

they play Brag rather than watch the screen.

The ice-cream girl’s tired of pacing the aisles.

She rests her thumbs in the tray-straps, and dreams.

It’s a rainy afternoon in Goole

and this cinema’s the last refuge

for men in macs and kids bunking off school.

They yawn, pick their nails and dream

by text-message. Look at the screen,

it says CU, CU, CU.

The panting of buses through caves of memory:

school bus with boys tossing off

in the back seat when I was eight,

knowing the words, not knowing

what it was those big boys were murkily doing,

and the conductor with fierce face

yelling down farm lanes at kids as they ran

Can you not get yourselves up in the morning?

The sway of buses into town

the way the unlopped branches of lime

knocked like sticks against railings,

the way women settled laps and bags,

shut their eyes, breathed out on a cigarette,

gave themselves to nothing for ten minutes

as someone else drove the cargo of life,

until the conductor broke their drowse

in a flurry of one-liners,

and they found coin in their fat purses.

It was the green lorry with its greasy curtain

like a leather apron,

backing into the lane behind the terrace

for a lorry-load of stuff.

Cardboard boxes of books from the last move,

not opened since. That’s thirteen years

where
A Beginner’s Guide to Birdsong

and
Marxism Matters
have not been wanted.

Two plastic caterpillars, clattering

like tongues. They were new once,

expensive enough to keep for no purpose.

The boxes exist, though they don’t fit.

A turquoise baby-bath, impregnated

with the white-knuckle grip of one baby

and the fat relaxed fist of the other.

One afternoon it served as a sledge

before the proper sledge, this one

(which we also don’t want). Remember those woods,

and our stopped breath that headlong

downhill with both boys crammed in front.

A proper lorry-load of stuff

needs bits of wood, likely shapes

that finally won’t hold shelves up.

It needs a toddler’s bike

hand-painted silver by a nine-year-old

then torn apart to make a go-kart.

If there is old food (lentils,

tins with rust-spots, onion sets

that never got planted, or could be gladioli)

so much the better. In a climate too cold

for cockroaches, you can afford to be careless

of larder shelves. And your lorry-load

is incomplete without the photographs

you kept taking, badly, from duty,

interrupting the happiest moments

as you saw them. The booty

of time, it was going to be. Lose them

to the panting of the lorry’s engine

impatient now, throbbing, and to the man

parting the curtain, chucking stuff in.

There’s a stone set in the car-park wall

down at knee-level

which commends her.

There are these relics: a scrap of wool,

a lost button, an unfollowed pattern.

There is her stone, set in the car-park wall

its flinty lettering so bright cut

it would blind her.

Here, on this path, slowly, leaning

on two sticks, she still comes.

Trying to know all the new faces

she looks about her, tortoise-sweet.

How patiently she wants God to unbutton

her two cardigans,

but he is slow.

Here, buttoning her cardigans

with lumpy fingers she bungles

in the lee of a breeze-block wall.

Virgin with Pineapple

Virgin with the Globe as a Golden Ball

Virgin with Two Cardigans

pushing a pearl button

into the gnarl of its hole.

First, the retreat of bees

lifting, heavy with the final

pollen of gorse and garden,

lugging the weight of it, like coal sacks

heaped on lorry-backs

in the ice-cream clamour of August.

The retreat of bees, lifting

all at once from city gardens –

suddenly the roses are scentless

as cold probes like a tongue,

crawling through the warm crevices

of Kew and Stepney. The ice comes

slowly, slowly, not to frighten anyone.

Not to frighten anyone. But the Snowdon

valleys are muffled with avalanche,

the Thames freezes, the Promenade des Anglais

clinks with a thousand icicles, where palms

died in a night, and the sea

of Greece stares back like stone

at the ice-Gorgon, white as a sheet.

Ice squeaks and whines. Snow slams

like a door miles off, exploding a forest

to shards and matchsticks. The glacier

is strangest, grey as an elephant,

too big to be heard. Big-foot, Gorgon –

a little mythology

rustles before it is stilled.

So it goes. Ivy, mahonia, viburnum

lift their fossilised flowers

under six feet of ice, for the bees

that are gone. As for being human

it worked once, but for now

and the foreseeable future

the conditions are wrong.

Cyclamen, blood-red, fly into winter

against the grey grain of concrete

eight floors up.

Winged, poised, intricate,

tough as old boots

flying the kite

of pure colour

season to season

under a laurel leaf

they make rebellion.

‘It is finished,’ said Christ. Blood ebbed from his face.

He was wan and pitiful as a dying prisoner.

The lord of light closed his eyes to the light,

day shrank back, the sun darkened in terror;

The temple walls collapsed into rubble

solid rock split, and it seemed black night.

Earth shivered like living flesh,

the dead heard, and emerged

rising up from their deep-dug graves

to tell the world why this storm was wrenching it.

‘For a bitter battle,’ said one dead man walking,

‘Life and Death are wrestling in the darkness

and no one knows who shall be the winner

until Sunday, when the sun rises,’

that said, he sank down

a dead man, into deep earth again.

Some said it was God’s own son who died so well.

Truly this was the son of God
,

Some said he was a sorcerer, and practised witchcraft,

‘Let’s try him, find out if he’s really dead

or still alive, before they take down the body.’

There were two thieves that suffered death

on the cross beside Christ. An officer came

and broke their bones, the arms and legs on each man.

But all shrank from laying hands on Christ.

He was King and knight himself, his nature God-given,

and none had the boldness to touch him in his dying.

Only a blind knight stepped out, holding his spear

that was ground keen and sharp as a razor.

He was named Longinus, and had been blind for long years.

Despite his protests, they pushed him forward

to joust with Jesus, this blind Jew Longinus.

No one else dared, of all those standing there,

to touch Jesus or take him down for burial,

only the blind man, who struck his lance through Christ’s heart.

Blood leaped down the shaft and melted the darkness

that sealed the knight’s eyes. As the light shone

he knelt and cried to Christ to forgive him

‘It was against my will that I wounded you,

I bleed to think of what I have done to you.

I yield to your mercy. Do what you like with me.

Take my land and my life, they belong to you.’

For a while in my dream I withdrew into the shadows

as if I would sink down into hell’s darkness.

There my sight cleared, there this was revealed:

out of the west a young woman came hurrying

gentle, benign, sweet-spoken,

compassion itself shining. Mercy was her name

and as she came she stared into hell’s mouth.

From the east, as it seemed in my vision,

her sister appeared, lightly stepping westward:

she was virgin, pristine, inviolable Truth,

wrapped in such virtue that she feared nothing.

When they met, Mercy and Truth together,

they asked each other about these signs and wonders

the din and darkness, and how the day dawned

and how a glow and glory lay at hell’s mouth.

‘I am dumbfounded, dazzled,’ said Truth,

‘I must go and make sense out of these mysteries.’

‘No mystery,’ said Mercy, ‘but signs of bliss.

A virgin named Mary became a mother

though no man touched her. She conceived by the word

and touch of the holy spirit, grew great, gave birth.

Without labour or loss she brought her child into the world.

God is my witness that my tale is true

and thirty winters have passed since that child was born

who suffered and died today, about mid-day;

it is his death which has darkened the sun

and made the bright world lightless, but this eclipse has meaning:

like the sun, man shall be released from shadow

when the light of life blinds the eyes of Lucifer.

The prophets and patriarchs have preached to us

that what was lost by a tree should be won back through a tree,

and what death felled, shall be death’s downfall.’

‘What friend of a friend told you that?’ asked Truth.

‘Listen to me. This is Truth speaking.

Adam and Eve, Abraham,

all their companions, all that are human,

all those prophets and patriarchs that suffer hell’s pains –

that light will never be allowed to lift them up

and have them out of hell – Mercy, stop mouthing

and hold your tongue, for I am Truth

and I tell this truth, that hell holds them.

Read Job, and let him put you right by his ruling

that hell
allows no redemption
.’

Mercy, unruffled, answered her sister.

‘I have grounds for hope, hope for salvation.

Poison drives out poison, the cycle is broken

Adam and Even shall find their redemption.

Of all venoms the worst is the scorpion’s.

No doctor’s skill can heal the site of his sting,

until the scorpion dies, and, held to the wound

drives out its own poison, turns sting to balm.

I would lay a bet with my life as stake

that this death will undo the deathly devilment

done to Eve in the earliest days.

And as the serpent seduced and beguiled,

so grace, which made all things, will mend all things,

and trick the tricksters by holy sleight of hand.’

‘Let’s stop all this,’ said Truth, ‘I see, not far off,

Righteousness running out of the north

from the cut of the cold. Let’s argue no more

for she’s the eldest of us, and knows most.’

‘True,’ said Mercy, ‘and look, from the south

Peace dressed in Patience, dancing towards us.

Love has longed for her so long, I think it must be that Love

himself has written to her. His love-letter

will enlighten us all. We’ll soon know the meaning

of this light that hangs over hell.’

When Peace, clothed in Patience, came up to them,

Righteousness curtsied to Peace in her rich clothing

and begged her to say which way she was going,

and whose hearts she would lift by the loveliness of her dress.

‘I am filled with longing to welcome them all,’

said Peace, ‘all those who have been hidden from me

by the pollution of sin and hell’s darkness,

Adam and Eve and a crowd of others,

Moses and more than I can name. Mercy shall sing

while I dance to her music: do so, dear sister!

For Jesus fought well for them, and this is joy’s dawning.

Love, who is my lover, has sent me a warrant

which declares that Mercy and Peace bring freedom

to release the human race from its prison,

for Christ has changed the nature of justice

into peace and forgiveness, through his grace.

Here’s the warrant,’ said Peace, ‘
in peace I will both lay me down
–

and to prove it is binding –
and rest secure
.’

‘Are you out of your mind,’ asked Righteousness,

or have you been drinking?

Do you really think that light there

has power to unlock hell?

Do you really believe it can save human souls?

When the world began, God gave his judgement

that Adam and Eve and their descendants

should die, and go down to everlasting darkness

for touching the tree and its sweet fruit.

Adam broke the law of our lord and denied his love,

by eating the fruit he gave up both love and law,

followed evil and fought against reason.

– by the letter of the law it is all over,

they must suffer for ever, no prayer,

no intercession can come near them.

They chose the fruit, let them chew on it.

And as for us, sisters, let’s not complain of it.

That apple bite was a landslip

which changed their landscape for ever.’

‘But I shall pray for them,’ Peace said, ‘for the end of their pain.

Joy and suffering are twined together so tightly

that one cannot be known without the other.

Hunger means nothing to full stomachs.

If all the world were like a swan’s breast,

who would know what white was?

If night never came, what would day mean,

and if God’s own tongue had not tasted death

how would he tell if was sweet or sour?

A rich man, living in health and ease

would never suffer, but for the death

that comes to all, equally, inescapably.

So God, who struck the light that began life

chose to be born human, to save mankind,

and be sold into death to feel the pain of dying,

which unknits all cares and ends suffering.

*

God placed Adam in peace and plenty,

God gave him freedom to sin and to suffer

to learn through this what his happiness was.

and God challenged himself to take on Adam’s nature

and know human fate in his own flesh.

He came from heaven, lived on earth, and now

will go down to hell, and discover

the depth of suffering. The dark world

opens to Christ, who lived in heaven’s light.

Christ will take the human race with him

on the same journey. Their descent into evil

will lead them to know where love is.’

‘Listen,’ said Truth, ‘I see and hear it happening.

A spirit speaks to hell and bids it unbar the gates.

‘
Lift up your heads, O ye gates
…’

A voice blazed from the light at Lucifer,

‘Prince of this place, tear these gates open

for the crowned King of Glory to enter them.’

Then Satan shuddered and said to hell

‘A light like this took Lazarus from us.

This is the moment of our undoing.

If this king enters, he will take mankind from us

and lead it where Lazarus has gone, and seize me.

Patriarchs and prophets warned of this

that such a lord and such a light would lead them.

Get up, Ragamoffyn, reach me those bars

from your Grandad Belial’s wife-battering

and I’ll stop this lord and his light.

Before this brightness blinds us, let’s bar the gates,

check his course, chain our doors, stop up the chinks

so no light leaps in at the loop holes or louvers.

Ashtaroth, get the lads moving, the whole gang of them,

to defend mankind. They’re ours, we’ll keep them.

Hurl down the brimstone, blazing and boiling

to flay the flesh of those who come near our kingdom.

Set the crossbows and the brass cannon

and blind his troops with our ammunition.’

‘Listen,’ said Lucifer, ‘I know this lord,

this lord and this light. From long ago I knew him.

No death can snuff out this lord, hell cannot cheat him.

Where he wishes, there he goes. But let him look out.

If he tears them away from me, he does it by force, not right.

For by right and reason, they belong to me

body and soul, the good and the evil.

For the lord of heaven himself promised it:

Adam and Eve and all their descendants

should suffer death and come to me for ever

if they touched the tree or picked the apple.

It was this same lord of light who gave the judgement,

and since he is truth itself, he must keep to it,

not tear from us what is ours, damned by justice.

We have had them with us for seven thousand winters,

legally ours, with no one arguing it.

Will he be untrue, who is truth itself?’

‘True,’ said Satan, ‘but all the same…

You trapped them and tricked them, trampled down his Eden.

Against his law and desire you slunk onto his land

and caught Eve alone.

Woe to those who are alone!

And when you had separated her, you seduced her,

then promised them both they should become

as Gods with God, judging and knowing.

With treason and treachery you deceived them both

and brought them to break obedience through false promises.

So you got them out of Eden, and brought them here at last.

It was deception, not fair getting.

God will not be mocked,’ said the Evil One.

‘Watch out if you try to make a fool of him.

Our title deeds to their souls are false.

My terror is that truth will come for them.

As you mocked God’s image in becoming snake

so God has deceived us in becoming man.

For God has gone about for thirty winters

in human flesh, travelling, preaching.

I sent sin to court him, and I asked him

if he were God, or God’s son. He gave me a short answer.

So he’s been out and about these thirty-two years.

When I saw what was happening, I plotted and planned

to stop those who hated him from martyring him.

I would have lengthened his life, for I believed

if he died, if his soul penetrated Hell

it would make an end of us all.

While his bones lived, he never rested

from his love lessons. ‘Love one another’ –

but the end of that love, and the aim of that law

is the end of us devils, and our downfall.

And now I see his soul come sailing towards us

in light and glory – I know this is God.

We must retreat, throw down our arms.

It would be better for us never to have been,

better to vanish from existence

than to endure the sight of this Christ.

Through your lies, Lucifer, we first lost heaven

and plunged to hell. You dragged us down.

We swallowed your lies and lost all happiness,

and now, because you had to lie again

and betray Eve, we have lost hell and earth

where we were lords and ruled everything.

Now shall the prince of this world be cast out
.’