on the stairs going up, showing respect
for the small words of the ones leaving,
the ones who don’t stay for the dancing.
One sister twists a white candle
waxed in a nest of hydrangeas –
brick-red and uncommon, flowers
she really can’t want – she bruises the limp
warm petals with crisp fingers
and then poises her sandal
over the next non-slip stair
so the dance streams at her heels
in the light of a half-shut door.
On not writing certain poems
You put your hand over mine and whispered
‘There he is, laying against the pebbles’ –
you wouldn’t point for the shadow
stirring the trout off his bed
where he sculled the down-running water,
and the fish lay there, unbruised
by the soft knuckling of the river-bed
or your stare which had found him out.
Last night I seemed to be walking
with something in my hand, earthward, down-
dropping as lead, unburnished –
a plate perhaps or a salver
with nothing on it or offered
but its own shineless composure.
I have it here on my palm, the weight
settled, spreading through bone
until my wrist tips backward, pulled down
as if my arm was laid in a current
of eel-dark water – that thrum
binding the fingers – arrow-like –
Privacy of rain
Rain. A plump splash
on tense, bare skin.
Rain. All the May leaves
run upward, shaking.
Rain. A first touch
at the nape of the neck.
Sharp drops kick the dust, white
downpours shudder
like curtains, rinsing
tight hairdos to innocence.
I love the privacy of rain,
the way it makes things happen
on verandahs, under canopies
or in the shelter of trees
as a door slams and a girl runs out
into the black-wet leaves.
By the brick wall an iris
sucks up the rain
like intricate food, its tongue
sherbetty, furred.
Rain. All the May leaves
run upward, shaking.
On the street bud-silt
covers the windscreens.
Dancing man
That lake lies along the shore
like a finger down my cheek,
its waters lull and collapse
dark as pomegranates,
the baby crawls on the straw
in the shadow-map of his father’s chair
while the priest talks things over
and light dodges across his hair.
There’s a lamp lit in the shed
and a fire on, and a man drinking
spiritus fortis he’s made for himself.
But on the floor of the barn
the dancing man is beginning to dance.
First a beat from the arch of his foot
as he stands upright, a neat
understatement of all that’s in him
and he lowers his eyes to her
as if it’s nothing, nothing –
but she has always wanted him.
Her baby crawls out from the chairs
and rolls in his striped vest laughing
under the feet of the dancers
so she must dance over him
toe to his cheek, heel to his hair,
as she melts to the man dancing.
They are talking and talking over there –
the priest sits with his back to her
for there’s no malice in him
and her husband glistens like the sun
through the cypress-flame of the man dancing
In the shed a blackbird
has left three eggs which might be kumquats –
they are so warm. One of them’s stirring –
who said she had deserted them?
In the orchard by the barn
there are three girls wading,
glossy, laughing at something,
they spin a bucket between them,
glowing, they are forgotten –
something else is about to happen.
At Cabourg II
The bathers, where are they? The sea is quite empty,
lapsed from its task of rinsing the white beach.
The promenade has a skein of walkers, four to the mile,
like beads threaded on the long Boulevard in front of the flowers.
Shutters are all back on the bankers’ fantasy houses,
but the air inside is glassy as swimming-pool water,
no one breathes there or silts it with movement,
Out of the kitchen a take-away steam rises:
the bankers are having sushi in honour of their guests
who are here, briefly, to buy ‘an impressionist picture’.
A boy is buried up to his neck in sand
but the youth leader stops another who pretends to piss on him.
The rest draw round, they have got something helpless:
his head laid back on its platter of curls.
With six digging, he’s out in a minute.
They oil his body with Ambre Solaire,
two boys lay him across their laps, a third
wipes at his feet then smiles up enchantingly.
Baron Hardup
I see the boys at the breakwater
straighten now, signalling friends,
and the little imperious one who is just not
dinted at the back of the arms
with child-like softness
sticks up his thumb to mark the next leap.
This far off it’s peaceful to watch them
while I’m walking ahead barefoot
on a wide, grey Norman promenade,
thinking of the Baron de Charlus
not in his wheelchair but younger,
bumbling into seduction in a hot courtyard,
tipped upside-down like a sand-timer,
labelled implacably – ‘the invert’
caught at the wide-striped
dawn years of the century
where the candy of skirts blows inward and outward
to a pure, bellying offshore wind.
The beautiful line of his coat ripples –
he’s Baron Hardup with dreams tupping
like pantomime horses – he fixes his eyeglass
and glares at the waves with passionate indecisiveness
as if to stop, or not stop, their irregular fall,
while the boys figure what he is good for.
Nearly May Day
After a night jagged by guard-dogs and nightingales
I sit to be videoed
at the corner of this carved balcony
where ten o’clock sun falls
past the curve of the Berlin Wall.
It’s nearly May Day.
Just here there’s a double wall –
a skin of concrete, a skin of stone
the colour of the Alsatians.
My feet shift on the slats.
I want to comb my hair straight.
I have my back
to a wood in the closed zone –
an orchard’s bright pelt
sparkling with blossom tips.
Bees fly in purposeful zigzags
over the Wall, tracing their map
of air and nectar.
Each day they fly through the spoors
of air-wiping floodlights now
sheathed in the watch-towers
to this one apple tree
which makes a garden of itself
under the balcony.
&nb
sp; I have my back to the church.
Its roof glows in the gaps
where slate after slate’s peeled off.
I have my back to the porch
with its red lining of valerian,
its sound like a cough
as the doors squeeze themselves shut.
Katja unrolls cable
over the balcony rail.
A double wiring of roses
straddles the pews
in a hamlet which is the other half of here,
clear and suggestive as a mirror.
They say nobody lives there
but guards’ wives and children.
You rarely see them,
they melt into the woods like foxes
but you hear their motorbikes miles off
clutching the road surface.
You might hear the guards’ wives say
‘Let the kids have the grapes’
just as the nightingales insist
for hours when you can’t sleep.
This hamlet’s like something I’ve dreamed
in a dream broken by rain,
with its lilac and dull green
tenderly shifting leaves,
its woodpiles,
its watched inhabitants,
wives of the guards
who have between them a little son
in a too-tight yellow jersey
flashing along their own balcony.
He runs from his steep-roofed home
to scrabble onto his tricycle
and race with fat frantic legs pedalling
the few square metres marked by the wives
with a shield-square of clothes-line
where they’re forever hanging things out
while my back’s turned.
I study the guards’ underpants
and wish I still smoked
so I could blow smoke-rings
from the balcony of Jagdschloss Glienicke
past the flowering jaws of the apple tree
over complicated roof-shells
to the child himself.
I’d wave, holding the cigarette
cupped behind my back.
Any time they choose
people are changing Deutschmarks
for a tick on cheap paper,
a day-trip to the East
to buy Bulgarian church music
and butter at half-price,
to check their faces in a mirror
and get it all on video.
to walk through a map of mirrors
into the other half of here.
There’s mist on the Glienicke bridge.
The flags are limp.
There’s nothing flying at all –
not a flag, not an aeroplane
racing down safe corridors.
It’s nearly May Day.
A riot’s ripening in Kreuzberg.
If this is Spring, it’s going on elsewhere
grasping horse-chestnut buds
in sticky hands
warm and forgetful
as a child who buries himself
for joy in Pankow’s warm sands.
[September 1989]
Three workmen with blue pails
Three workmen with blue pails
swerve past an election poster
wrapped round a lamp-post pillar,
signed with a single carnation
and a name for each ward.
The workmen guffaw –
it’s five past three on a small street
which traipses off Unter den Linden
deep into East Berlin.
Short, compact and bored
they tramp over the slats
where the pavement’s torn up.
One of them’s telling a joke.
They swing on under a banner
for a play by Harold Pinter –
stretched linen, four metres wide
and at least two workmen tall,
spread on a ten-metre wall –
the play’s The Dumb Waiter.
They go on past a kindergarten
which is tipping out children,
past banks with bullet-holes in them,
past an industrial shoal
of tower-block homes
to the second-right turn
where the pulse of street-life picks up,
where there are people and shops.
Ahead, a queue forms
as a café rattles itself open
and starts to serve out ice cream.
Inside his treacle-brown frame
a young man flickers and smiles
as he fans out the biscuit-shells –
already half the ice cream’s gone
and the waiter teases the children
with cold smoke from a new can.
Seeds stick to their tongues –
gooseberry, cloudberry – chill,
grainy and natural.
Shoving their caps back
the workmen join on
and move forward in line
for what’s over. Tapping light coins
they move at a diagonal
to a blue, skew-whiff ditched Trabbi.
Brown coal
The room creaked like a pair of lungs
and the fire wouldn’t go
till we held up the front page for it.
All the while the news was on
that day they wired up the Wall
while I was swimming on newspaper –
a cold rustle of words
to the wheezing of my sister.
I caught the fringe of her scarf
in winter smogs after school
as she towed me through the stutter
of high-lamped Ford Populars
and down the mouth of the railway tunnel
into water-pocked walls
and the dense sulphurous hollows
of nowhere in particular.
It was empty but for smog.
Coughing through our handkerchiefs
we walked eerily, lammed
at the brickwork, picked ourselves up.
I walked through nowhere last April
into a mist of brown coal,
sulphur emissions, diesel
stopped dead at the Wall,
the whiff of dun Trabants
puttering north/south
past a maze of roadworks,
leaving hours for us to cross
in the slow luxury of strolling
as the streets knit themselves up
to become a city again.
By instinct I kept my mouth shut
and breathed like one of us girls
in our “identical-twin” coats,
listening out for rare cars,
coal at the back of our throats –
it was England in the fifties,
half-blind with keeping us warm,
so I was completely at ease
in a small street off Unter Den Linden
as a fire-door behind wheezed
and Berlin creaked like two lungs.
Safe period
Your dry voice from the centre of the bed
asks ‘Is it safe?’
and I answer for the days as if I owned them.
Practised at counting, I rock
the two halves of the month like a cradle.
The days slip over their stile
and expect nothing. They are just days,
and we’re at it again, thwarting
souls from the bodies they crave.
They’d love to get into this room
under the yellow counterpane
we’ve torn to make a child’s cuddly,
they’d love to slide into the sheets
between soft, much-washed
flannelette fleece,
they’d love to be here in the moulded spaces
between us, where there is no room,
but we don’t let them. They fly abou
t gustily,
noisy as our own children.
Big barbershop man
Big barbershop man turning away,
sides of his face
lathered and shaved
close with the cut-throat
he always uses,
big barbershop man turning away,
helping the neighbours
make good, sweating
inside a stretched t-shirt
with NO MEANS YES on the back of it,
waltzing a side of pig,
taking the weight,
scalp like a glove
rucked with the strain,
big barbershop man turning away
trim inside like a slice of ham
big barbershop man
hoisting the forequarter,
fat marbled with meat
stiff as a wardrobe,
big barbershop man
waltzing a side of pig
striped like a piece
of sun awning, cool
as a jelly roll,
big barbershop man waltzing the meat
like a barber’s pole on yellow Main Street.
The dry well
It was not always a dry well.
Once it had been brimming with water.
cool, limpid, delicious water,
but a man came and took water from the well