until I was swallowed
in the dark of the turning staircase.
Lethe
Is it Lethe or is it dock water?
Either has the power.
The neighbourhood killer
is somewhere quietly washing up
dipping and dipping his fork
in the dirty water.
The police vans sit crooning
on the crux of the Downs.
How quickly the young girls walk
from work and from the shops.
The frost that was bone cold
has eased into rain, the dock water
takes everything and turns it brown.
The Queue’s Essentially
The queue’s essentially
docile surges get us
very slowly somewhere.
Like campfire, life springs up –
that pair ahead of me
(newly landed on Easyjet, he
shunts the wheeled, packed
tartan suitcase
inch by inch
through jumpy fractures of brake-light
on wet pavement) –
that pair ahead of me
who graze on their vegetable pasty
and pass it in Polish
from his hand to hers –
so intimate, rained-upon –
learning so quickly it will be a mistake
to take that taxi
all the way to Kilburn –
The Captainess of Laundry
I am the captainess of laundry
and I sing to its brave tune,
to the crack and the whip and the flap of the sheets
and the rack going up, going down, going down
and the rack going up and going down,
I am the captainess of laundry
and I salt my speech with a song
of the bleach and the blue and the colours holding true
and the glaze of the starch on my skin, my skin,
and the glaze of starch on my skin,
I am the captainess of laundry
and I swing my basket through the town
with the sheets and the shirts and the white petticoats
and a snowy-breasted cover tied around, tied around
and a snowy-breasted cover tied around.
The Day’s Umbrellas
On the same posts each evening
the harbour cormorants
hang out their wings to dry
like the day’s umbrellas
as the late ferry passes.
In sour-sweet ramparts of ivy
the blackbirds call
drowsily, piercingly.
Above them the gulls
are casing the terraces.
Thickly, the pigeons
groom their own voices
as parents in the half-light
tiptoe away from babies
over their heads in sleep.
The Deciphering
How busy we are with the dead in their infancy,
who are still damp with the sweat of their passing,
whose hair falls back to reveal a scar.
We think of wiping their skin, attending them
in the old way, but are timid, ignorant.
We walk from the high table where they are laid
leaving their flesh royally mounded
just as they have left it
for the undertakers to cherish.
We consider the last kiss,
the taste and the grain of it.
The lift doors squeeze open, then shut.
All day we think that we have lost our car keys.
There is a feeling in the back of the mind
as we eat a meal out on the balcony
but the door refuses to open
and although my sisters have prepared food elaborately
you do not advance to us, smiling.
The children have put sauce on the side of their plates
thinking you will come and swipe a chip,
thinking this meal is one you cooked
as always, humming to yourself in the kitchen,
breaking off to tap the barometer
and watch starlings roost on the pier.
How long it takes to stop being busy with that day,
each second of it like the shard
of a pot which someone has laboured to dig up
and piece together without knowledge
of language or context.
Slow, slow, the deciphering.
The Tarn
Still as the water is
the wind draws on it in iron
this is the purple country, the border
where we threw ourselves down
onto the heather.
Even the lapwing knows how to pretend.
She runs with her broken wing
to hide the fact of her young.
A cold small rain spatters the tarn
the wind writes on the dark water.
The Gift
You never wanted the taste
of the future on your tongue.
How often, hurriedly, I saw you
swallow a premonition.
If the gift comes, you told me,
do not let it in.
Obedient, I wrote poems
but the gift still came
though the doors were bolted.
I’m here, it told me
to make you know things
but not their names.
What Will You Say
(after Baudelaire)
What will you say, my soul, poor and alone,
and my heart with its heart sucked out,
What will you say tonight to the one
(if she’s really the one this time)?
totheverybeautifultotheverygoodtotheverydear
Ah no. Speak clearly. What will you say
to her, so good, so fair, so dear
whose heavenly gaze has made your desert flower?
You’ll say you’ve had enough. No more.
You’ve no pride left but what goes to praise her.
No strength left but in her douce power,
no senses but what she gives.
Sweet authority! Douce power!
or do you mean you’re shit-scared
to go anywhere without her?
Is she your mother?
Her look clothes us in light.
Her ghost is the scent of a rose.
Let her ghost dance with the air
let its torch blaze through the streets –
You’d like that, no doubt.
When you’ve given up running after her
her ghost will issue commands
to do what you’ve already done.
It’s over with you. If she won’t feed you
you must stay hungry. She is your guardian
angel, your bodyguard, no one
comes close, you can’t love anyone.
Cloud
Nature came to us abhorring sharp edges
raw sunlight and the absence of cloud:
it is November deep in the mist
and by a gate a man stands lost in thought –
how that farm hunkers ruddily in a crease of land
and the dog yaps into the twilight –
We used to say we were walking in the cloud
do you remember? – and we were born there
natives of chrysanthemums, bonfire afternoons,
makers of the finest shades of meaning.
Low over the hill the cloud hangs.
Mist fills the serrations of plough.
I Have Been Thinking of You So Loudly
I have been thinking of you so loudly
that perhaps as you walked down the street you turned
on hearing your name’s decibels
sing from pavement, hoardings and walls
until like glass from last night’s disasters
your name shattered. Soon sweeper
s will come
and all my love of you will vanish
as if it had never been.
Meanwhile, hurry before lateness catches you,
run until the wind blows out your coat,
don’t stand irresolute
like me, thinking too loudly.
The Kingdom of the Dead
The kingdom of the dead is like an owl
in the heart of the city, hunting
at the Downs’ margin.
Over Carter’s Steam Fair,
over the illicitly parked cars
where lovers tighten and quicken,
it glides with a tilt of the wing.
The kingdom of the dead is like a mouse
in the owl’s eye, a streak of brown
at the Downs’ margin.
Under the bright hooves of Carter’s horses it hides
this mouse, a drop of water
which flows in its terror
into a beer can.
The kingdom of the dead is like the boot
of a boy in the bliss of fair-time
rucking the grass at the Downs’ margin.
Carter’s is turning out now, he runs
in and out of the horses
and kicks the beer can
into the touch of heaven.
The Last Heartbeat
The last heartbeat washes the body clean of pain
in a tide of endorphins,
the last sound coils into the ears, and stirs
ossicles, cochlea, the tiny hairs.
For a day or more
long after the onlookers
have turned away
thinking it’s all over
the firework show of synapses
and the glorious near-touch
of axons in the brain
slowly dies down
to a last, exquisite connection.
The Old Mastery
Weary and longing to go home
you dress slowly.
Not much of your wardrobe likes you.
You reach for those trousers again
and buff up your shoes
with the old mastery.
The Overcoat
It wears a smell of earth, not air.
I am under it forever.
Sometimes I sleep, sometimes I shiver.
There is a map and I am on it.
the bed’s icy geography
is iron, dust-devil, ticking.
Sometimes I fetch from my dreams
the shapes of neighbours, friends,
the smell of rubber perishing.
Sometimes the bed-springs groan
under the weight of the coat.
It will not let me out.
I hold fear so steadily
it stays all in one piece.
I hold the coat’s collar.
I hold my breath while the ghost
that lives inside it slides past me
and is bequeathed.
Window Cleaners at Ladysmith Road
Some swear by vinegar and some by newspaper.
Some brandish a shammy leather.
Here they come with their creamy forearms,
their raw red hands, pinnies and aprons
until they stand at my shoulder.
I smell them but don’t dare turn.
They are judging smears on the glass,
and as for me and the present
they’ll soon have that off.
A warped shine shows the street buckling
into the past, as helpless as I am
not to reflect those boys on the corner
smoking Woodbines from the tobacconist’s
which no longer exists.
I Heard You Sing in the Dark
(for Tess)
I heard you sing in the dark
a few clear notes on the stairs
a blackbird in the cold of dusk
forever folding your wings
and slipping, rustling down
past leaves and ivy knots
to where your song bubbled
out of the crevices
into cold, clear February dusk.
I heard the notes plain
rising to the surface
of evening and then down again
almost chuckling, in a blackbird’s cold
liquid delight, and so I turned
on the landing, and you were gone.
La Recouvrance
The schooner La Recouvrance is almost at the horizon now, sailing south-west. Much closer, the sea is recovering ground. In town the equinoctial spring tides will bring water up the slipway, over the wall and into the sandbagged streets. But here the tide can rise as far as it likes. This cove will be swallowed up soon. Anyone foolish enough to wait too long before they climb the rocks will be washed away like their own footprints. Each small, collapsing wave darkens another arc of the white sand. If you watch it like this you’ll be entranced and you won’t move until it’s too late. Today the sea has a particular smell that isn’t like sea at all. If you had your eyes closed you would guess at flowers in the distance. Nothing sweet or perfumed, but a sharp, early narcissus.
You’ve brought the child down here with you, although it’s not very safe. You lift her over the clefts and gullies, carrying everything you need in a back-pack and coming back for her. She waits for you obediently, perched above the drop.
There are just the two of you in the sea. Thigh deep, and now waist deep. The incoming tide pushes against you, and you hold the child’s hand, but there are no rips here. Every so often a wave lifts her off her feet. She can swim quite strongly now, and the lift of the sea makes her laugh, showing her sharp little teeth. She dips her head under a wave and brings it up. Her long hair is plastered to her skull and water streams down her face, shining.
You say it’s time to go now. She swims into your arms and her strong, cold little body clings to yours. She winds her legs around your waist. Together you stagger towards the shore, but while you are still in the sea’s embrace you turn back to see La Recouvrance one last time. Her tall masts have vanished. Already she has dipped below the horizon, as she sails away to the bottom of the world.
The Filament
Step by step, holding the thread,
step by step into the dark,
step by step, holding a flag of light
where the tunnel in secrecy closes
like fist or crocus.
My footsteps follow your footsteps
into the dark where they are still
after all these years
just beyond my hearing,
so I call to you in the language
that even now we speak
because you taught me to be haunted
by the catch and space of it –
because we paid for it.
At the tunnel’s end a black lake,
a small, desultory boat,
the pluck of the water
as the boat shapes from the shore
while a boatman reads his newspaper
with a desultory air.
The cave roof glistens.
The ribs and flanks of the chamber
all give back the dark water.
I am ready for the journey –
Shall we take ship together? –
Shall we lift my torch into the boat
and sit athwart?
Shall we pass our hands quickly
through crocus and saffron
like children playing with matches?
Even if the boat never sets sail
we can be content,
and I won’t look at your face
or write another word.
About the Author
Helen Dunmore is a poet, novelist, short story and children’s writer. Her poetry books have been given the Poetry Book Society Choice and Recommendations, Cardiff International Poetry Prize, Alice Hunt Bartlett Award and Signal Poetry Award, and Bestiary was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. br />
Her poem ‘The Malarkey’ won first prize in the National Poetry Competition in 2010. Her latest Bloodaxe poetry titles are Out of the Blue: Poems 1975–2001 (2001), Glad of These Times (2007), and The Malarkey (2012).
She has published eleven novels and three books of short stories with Penguin, including A Spell of Winter (1995), winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, Talking to the Dead (1996), The Siege (2001), Mourning Ruby (2003), House of Orphans (2006) and The Betrayal (2010), as well as a ghost story, The Greatcoat (2012), with Hammer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Copyright
All rights reserved
Copyright © Helen Dunmore 2012
First published 2012 by
Bloodaxe Books Ltd,
Highgreen,
Tarset,
Northumberland NE48 1RP.
This ebook edition first published in 2012.
www.bloodaxebooks.com
For further information about Bloodaxe titles