Out of the Blue (9 page)

The plum was my parents’ tree,

above them

as I was at my bedroom window

wondering why they chose to walk this way quietly

under the plum tree.

My sisters and I stopped playing

as they reached up and felt for the fruit.

It lay among bunches of leaves,

oval and oozing resin

out into pearls of gum.

They bit into the plums

without once glancing

back at the house.

Some years were thin:

white mildew streaking the trunk,

fruit buckled and green,

but one April

the tree broke from its temperate blossoming

and by late summer the branches

trailed earth, heavy with pound

after pound of bursting Victorias,

and I remember the oblivious steps

my parents took as they went quietly

out of the house one summer evening

to stand under the plum tree.

Tonight I’m eating the past

consuming its traces,

the past is a heap

sparkling with razor blades

where patches of sweetness

deepen to compost,

woodlice fold up their legs

and roll luxuriously,

cold vegetation

rises to blood heat.

The local sea’s bare

running up to the house

tufting its waves

with red seaweed

spread against a Hebridean noon.

Lightly as sandpipers marking the shoreline

boats at the jetty sprang

and rocked upon the green water.

Not much time passes, but suddenly

now when you’re crumpled after a cold

I see how the scale and changes

of few words measure us.

At this time of year I remember a cuckoo’s

erratic notes on a mild morning.

It lay full-fed on a cherry branch

repeating an hour of sweetness

its grey body unstirring

its lustrous eyes turning.

Talk sticks and patches

walls and the kitchen formica

while at the table outlines

seated on a thousand evenings

drain like light going out of a landscape.

The back door closes, swings shut,

drives me to place myself inside it.

In this flickering encampment

fire pours sideways

then once more stands

evenly burning.

I wake with a touch on my face

and turn sideways

butting my head into darkness.

The wind’s banging diminishes. An aircraft

wanders through the upper atmosphere

bee-like, propelled by loneliness.

It searches for a fallen corolla,

its note rising and going

as it crosses the four quarters.

The city turns a seamed cheek upward,

confides itself to the sound and hazardous

construction of a journey by starlight.

I drop back soundlessly,

my lips slackened.

Headache alone is my navigator,

plummeting, shedding its petals.

It’s Christmas Eve.

Against my nightdress a child’s foot, burning,

passes its fever through the cotton,

the tide of bells swings

and the child winces.

The bells are shamelessly

clanging, the voices

hollering churchward.

I’m eating the past tonight

tasting gardenia perfume

licking the child-like socket of an acorn

before each is consumed.

It was not Hardy who stayed there

searching for the air-blue gown.

It was the woman who once more, secretly,

tried the dress on.

O wintry ones, my sad descendants,

with snowdrops in your hands you join me

to celebrate these dark, short

days lacking a thread of sun.

Three is a virtuous number,

each time one fewer to love,

the number of fairy tales,

wishes, labours for love.

My sad descendants

who had no place in the sun,

hope brought you to mid-winter,

never to spring

or to the lazy benches of summer

and old bones.

My sad descendants

whose bones are a network of frost,

I carry your burn and your pallor,

your substance dwindled to drops.

I breathe you another pattern

since no breath warmed you from mine,

on the cold of the night window

I breathe you another pattern,

I make you outlive rosiness

and envied heartbeats.

Cursing softly and letting the matches drop

too close to the firework box,

we light an oblation

to rough-scented autumnal gods,

shaggy as chrysanthemums;

and you, in your pearly maroon

waterproof suit, with your round

baby brows, stare upward and name

chrysanthemum fountain and silver fountain

and Catherine wheel: saints’ names

like yours, Patrick, and you record them.

This morning, climbing up on my pillow,

you list saints’ names guessed at from school.

They go off, one by one on the ritual plank:

jack-in-a-box, high-jump and Roman candle,

searching the currant bushes with gunpowder.

We stand in savoury fumes like pillars,

our coats dark, our slow-burning fuse lit,

and make our little bonfire with spits

for foil-wrapped potatoes and hot-dogs –

by your bedtime

the rough-scented autumnal gods

fuse with the saints and jack-lanterns.

Today in a horse landscape

horses steam in the lee of thorn hedges

on soaking fields. Horses waltz

on iron poles in dank fairgrounds.

A girl in jodhpurs on Sand Bay

leads her pony over and over

jumps made of driftwood and traffic cones,

A TV blares the gabble of photofinishes.

The bookie’s plastic curtain releases

punters onto the hot street

littered with King Cone papers.

In a landscape with clouds and chalk downs

and cream houses, a horse rigid as bone

glares up at kites and hang-gliders.

One eye’s cut from the flowered turf:

a horse skull, whispering secrets

with wind-sighs like tapping on phone wires.

The group leader in beautiful boots

always on horse-back,

the mounted lady squinnying

down at the hunt intruders,

draw blood for their own horse landscape

and scorn horse-trading, letting the beasts mate

on scrubby fields, amongst catkins

and watery ditches.

Here’s a rearing bronze horse

welded to man, letting his hands

stay free for banner and weapon –

mild shadow of Pushkin’s nightmare.

Trained police horses sway on great hooves.

Riders avoid our faces, and gaze

down on our skull crowns

where the bone jigsaw cleaves.

Grooms whistle and urge

the sweaty beasts to endure battle.

We’re always the poor infantry

backing off Mars field,

out of frame for the heroic riders

preserved in their horse landscape.

Thetis, mother of all mothers

who fear the death of their children,

held down her baby Achilles

in the dark Styx

whose waters flow fast

without ripples or wave-break,

bearing little boats of paper

with matchstick masts,

returning not even a sigh

or drenched fibre to life.

Thetis, mother of all mothers

destined to outlive their children,

took Achilles by the heel

and thrust him into the Styx

so that sealed, immortal, dark-eyed,

he’d return to his white cradle

and to his willow rattle.

She might have held him less tightly

and for a while given him

wholly to the trustworthy river

which has no eddies or backwaters

and always carries its burdens onward,

she might have left him to play

on the soft grass of the river-edge.

But through the pressure-marks of her white fingers

the baby found his way forward

towards the wound he knew best.

Even while the arrow was in the wood

and the bow gleaming with leaves

the current of the Styx

faintly suckled and started

in the little flexed ankles

pressed against Thetis’ damp breasts.

Our day off, agreed by the wind

and miry fields and unburied dead,

in the tent with first light filtering

a rosy dawn which masks rain.

The rosiness rests on our damp flesh,

on armour stacked by the tent walls,

on our captain and his lolling companion.

I go down to the sea shore

to find white pebbles for games.

I look for the island, kidding myself

I see it hump through the waves.

Back in the tent it’s warm, wine-smelling,

heavy with breath.

The lamp shines on the bodies

of our captain and his companion.

These are the tented days I remember

more than the battles.

This is the smell of a herbal rub

on great Achilles.

This is the blue soap-scum on the pitcher,

and cold parcels of goat-meat,

the yawning moment

late in the evening, when I step out

and see the stars alight in their same places.

She kept Uncle Will's telegram

between the sheets of her wedding-album.

Her life-long imaginary future

dazzled the moment it came.

He tried the counter-top biro

and asked the post office clerk

to check the time of arrival

for ten words in block capitals.

In the levelled-down churchyard

they posed for the first photographs

while powdery grandmothers

whispered ‘We wish you'

and came up with the word ‘Happiness'.

She stood against laurel-black cherries

while the church dived into silence,

a great maritime creature

leaving without echoes.

At the lych-gate a tide-line

of white flowers remained.

In the Flowers the best man

read Uncle Will's telegram

and the guests lifted their glasses

shouting ‘Io, Io Hymen!'

Rapunzel

let down your hair,

let your strong hair

wind up the water you wish for.

All your life looking down

on bright tree-tops

your days go by quickly.

You read and you eat

in your white tower top

where sunlight fans through high

windows and far below you

bushes are matted with night.

With soft thumbprints

darkness muddles your pages.

The prince arrives,

whose noisy breathing

and sweat as he vaults your window-sill

draw you like wheat fields

on the enchanted horizontal.

He seeds your body with human fragments,

dandruff, nail-clippings, dust.

The detritus of new pleasures

falls on your waxed boards.

Your witch mother, sweeping them,

sorrowfully banishes the girl

who has let a prince clamber her.

For six years you wander the desert

from level to pale level.

At night you make a bunker to sleep in

near to the coyotes.

The ragged prince plays blind-man’s-buff

to the sound of your voice singing

as you gather desert grasses

in hollows hidden from him.

Daily your wise mother

unpicks the walls of the tower.

Its stones are taken for sheep-folds,

your circle of hair

hidden beneath the brambles.

A skater comes to this blue pond,

his worn Canadian skates

held by the straps.

He sits on the grass

lacing stiff boots

into a wreath of effort and breath.

He tugs at the straps and they sound

as ice does when weight troubles it

and cracks bloom around stones

creaking in quiet mid-winter

mid-afternoons: a fine time for a skater.

He knows it and gauges the sun

to see how long it will be safe to skate.

Now he hisses and spins in jumps

while powder ice clings to the air

but by trade he’s a long-haul skater.

Little villages, stick-like in the cold,

offer a child or a farm-worker

going his round. These watch him

go beating onward between iced alders

seawards, and so they picture him

always smoothly facing forward, foodless and waterless,

mounting the crusted waves on his skates.