and a man took water from the well again
and the well could not drink
from the low, slack water-table.
The well lacked a sense of its own danger
and a man came to take water from the well
and a woman came to take water from the well
but as the man was coming again
the well sighed in the dry darkness,
the well spoke in a quiet voice
from the deep-down bell of its emptiness
Give me some water.
But the man was at work with his heavy bucket
and he cried cheerfully, Wait half a minute,
I will just draw one more bucketful!
When he swung it up it was full of dust
and he was angry with the well.
Could it not have held out longer?
He had only needed one more bucketful.
Heron
It’s evening on the river,
steady, milk-warm,
the nettles head-down
with feasting caterpillars,
the current turning,
thin as a blade-bone.
Reed-mace shivers.
I’m miles from anywhere.
Who’s looking?
did a fish jump?
– and then a heron goes up
from its place by the willow.
With ballooning flight
it picks up the sky
and makes off, loaded.
I wasn’t looking,
I heard the noise of its wings
and I turned,
I thought of a friend,
a cool one with binoculars,
here’s rarity
with big wing-flaps, suiting itself.
One yellow chicken
One yellow chicken
she picks up expertly and not untenderly
from the conveyor of chickens.
Its soft beak gobbles feverishly
at a clear liquid which might be
a dose of sugar-drenched serum –
the beak’s flexible membrane
seems to engulf the chicken
as it tries to fix on the dropper’s glass tip.
Clear yellow juice gulps through a tube
and a few drops, suddenly colourless,
swill round a gape wide as the brim of a glass
but the chicken doesn’t seem afraid –
or only this much, only for this long
until the lab assistant flicks it back on
to the slowly moving conveyor of chickens
and it tumbles, catches itself,
then buoyed up by the rest
reels out of sight, cheeping.
Sailing to Cuba
I’d climbed the crab-apple in the wind
that wild season of Cuba,
I leaned out on the twigs
to where clouds heeled over like sails
on the house-bounded horizon,
but even from here I felt the radio throb
like someone who was there when the accident happened
‘not two yards from where I was standing’,
then Big Band music cha-cha’d from room to room
to fill in time between news.
At school we learned ‘Quinquireme of Nineveh
from distant Ophir…’ The ships nudged closer.
The wind roared to itself like applause.
Off the West Pier
Dropped yolks of shore-lamp quiver on tarmac –
the night’s disturbed and the sea itself
sidles about after its storm, buttery,
melting along the groynes.
The sea’s a martinet with itself,
will come this far and no farther
like a Prussian governess
corrupted by white sugar –
Oh but the stealth
with which it twitches aside mortar
and licks, and licks
moist grains off the shore.
By day it simply keeps marching
beat after beat like waves of soldiers
timed to the first push. In step with the music
it swells greenness and greyness, spills foam
onto a fly-swarming tide-line –
beertabs and dropped King Cones,
flotsam of inopportune partners
sticky with what came after.
A man lies on his back
settled along the swell, his knees
glimmering, catching a lick of moonlight,
lazy as a seagull on Christmas morning –
He should have greased himself with whale-blubber
like a twelve-year-old Goddess-chested
cross-Channel swimmer.
His sadness stripes through him like ink
leaving no space or him.
He paws slow arm sweeps and rolls
where the sea shoulders him.
Up there an aeroplane falters,
its red landing-lights on
scouting the coast home.
The pilot smokes a cigarette.
Its tip winks with each breath.
Winter 1955
We’re strung out on the plain’s upthrust,
bubbles against the sill of the horizon.
Already the dark folds each figure to itself
like a mother putting on her child’s overcoat,
or a paid attendant, who quickly and deftly
slots goose-pimpled arms into their stoles.
My own mother is attending to her daughters
in the Christmas gloom of our long garden
before the others are born.
A stream’s tongue takes its first courses:
in siren suits and our cheek-hugging bonnets
we put one foot each in that water.
Now standstill clumps sink and disappear
over the plate-edge of the world.
The trees hold up fingers like candelabra,
blue and unsure as the word ‘distant’.
Casually heeled there, we circle
the New Look skirts of our mother.
The attendant’s hands skim on a breast
fused into party-going ramparts of taffeta,
but he takes up his gaze into the hall
as if there’s nothing to be sorry or glad for,
and nothing in the snowy eternity
that feathers his keyhole.
Rinsing
In the corded hollows of the wood
leaves fall.
How light it is.
The trees are rinsing themselves of leaves
like Degas laundresses, their forearms
cold with the jelly-smooth
blue of starch-water.
The laundresses lean back and yawn
with their arms still in the water
like beech-boughs, pliant
on leavings of air.
In the corded hollows of the wood
how light it is.
How my excitement
burns in the chamber.
To Betty, swimming
You’re breast-up in the bubbling spaces you make for yourself,
your head in the air, pointy, demure,
ridiculous in its petalled swim-cap.
You chug slowly across the pool.
Your legs trail. Your arms won’t sweep
more than a third of the full stroke,
yet when you look up you’re curling with smiles,
complicit as if splashed
with mile-deep dives from the cliff’s height.
In Berber’s Ice Cream Parlour
A fat young man in BERBER’S ICE CREAM PARLOUR
under a tiled ceiling the colour of farm butter
with a mirror at 45° to his jaw.
His moist jowls, lucent and young
as the tuck where a baby’s buttock and thigh join,
quiver a little, preparing
to meet the order he’s given.
A tall glass skims the waitress’s breasts.
He holds on, spoon poised
to see if the syrup’ll trickle right
past the mound of chopped nuts to the ice-
white luscious vanilla sheltering
under its blanket of cream.
The yellow skin weakens and melts.
He devotes himself,
purses his lips to wrinkling-point,
digs down with the long spoon
past jelly and fruit
to the depths, with the cool
inching of an expert.
Beside him there’s a landscape in drained pink
and blue suggesting the sea
with an audacious cartoon economy.
They’ve even put in one white triangle
to make the horizon. A sail.
Large creamy girls mark the banana splits
with curls and squiggles,
pour sauce on peach melbas,
thumb in real strawberries.
Their bodies sail behind the counters,
balloons tight at the ropes, held down
by a customer’s need for more clotted cream
topping on his three-tier chocolate sundae.
They have eight tables to serve.
With their left hands they slap out the change
and comets smelling of nickel
for kids’ take-away treats,
and over on the bar counter there’s room
for adult, luxurious absorption
of dark mocha ice cream.
Flowing, damp-curled, the waitresses
pass with their trays
doubled by mirrors, bumping like clouds.
Not going to the forest
If you had said the words ‘to the forest’
at once I would have gone there
leaving my garden of broccoli and potato-plants.
I would not have struggled
to see the last ribbons of daylight
and windy sky tear over the crowns
of the oaks which stand here,
heavy draught animals
bearing, continually bearing.
I would have rubbed the velvety forest
against my cheek like the pincushion
I sewed with invisible stitches.
No. But you said nothing
and I have a child to think of
and a garden of parsnips and raspberries.
It’s not that I’m afraid,
but that I’m still gathering
the echoes of my five senses –
how far they’ve come with me, how far
they want to go on.
So the whale-back of the forest
shows for an instant, then dives.
I think it has oxygen within it
to live, downward, for miles.
Lutherans
Whichever way I turned on the radio
there was Sibelius
or an exceptionally long weather forecast.
Good practice: I’d purse up my lips
to the brief gulp of each phrase.
Sometimes I struck a chord with the World Service’s
sense-fuzz, like the smell of gardenia
perfume in Woolworth’s: instantly cloying,
the kind that doesn’t bloom on your skin,
or, in the two p.m. gloom of the town square,
I’d catch the pale flap of a poster
for the Helsingin Sanomat: POMPIDOU KUOLLUT.
I’d buy one, but never wrestle beyond the headline.
When pupils asked what I thought of ‘this three-day week’
I’d mention the candle-blaze
nightly in my room during the power-cuts,
and the bronchitis I had,
but I’d balance the fact that I smoked too much
against the marsh-chill when the heating went off.
I’d always stop on the railway bridge
even at one in the morning. The city was shapeless, squeezed in
by hills bristling with Sitka spruce.
The drunks had their fires lit
but they were slow, vulnerable, frozen
while flaming on a half-litre from the State Alcohol Shop.
If their luck held they’d bunch on the Sports Hall heating-grates
rather than be chipped free from a snow heap
in the first light of ten in the morning,
among a confusion of fur-hatted burghers
going to have coffee and cakes.
Work started at eight, there was never enough time.
They’d stop, chagrined, and murmur ‘It’s shocking’.
They were slowly learning not to buy the full-cream milk
of their farming childhoods; there was a government campaign
with leaflets on heart disease and exercise
and a broadsheet on the energy crisis
with diagrams suggesting the angles
beyond which windows should never be opened.
Their young might be trim, but they kept
a pious weakness for sinning on cake
and for those cloudy, strokeable hats
that frame Lutheran pallor.
After an evening visit to gym, they’d roll
the green cocoon of their ski-suited baby
onto the pupils’ table. Steadied with one hand
it lay prone and was never unpacked.
FROM
RECOVERING A BODY
(1994)
To Virgil
Lead me with your cold, sure hand,
make me press the correct buttons
on the automatic ticket machine,
make me not present my ticket upside down
to the slit mouth at the barriers,
then make the lift not jam
in the hot dark of the deepest lines.
May I hear the voice on the loudspeaker
and understand each syllable
of the doggerel of stations.
If it is rush-hour, let me be close to the doors,
I do not ask for space,
let no one crush me into a corner
or accidentally squeeze hard on my breasts
or hit me with bags or chew gum in my face.
If there are incidents, let them be over,
let there be no red-and-white tape
marking the place, make it not happen
when the tunnel has wrapped its arms around my train
and the lights have failed.
Float me up the narrow escalator
not looking backward, losing my balance
or letting go of your cold, sure hand.
Let there not be a fire
in the gaps, hold me secure.
Let me come home to the air.
Three Ways of Recovering a Body
By chance I was alone in my bed the morning
I woke to find my body had gone.
It had been coming. I’d cut off my hair in sections
so each of you would have something to remember,
then my nails worked loose from their beds
of oystery flesh. Who was it got them?
One night I slipped out of my skin. It lolloped
hooked to my heels, hurting. I had to spray on
more scent so you could find me in the dark,
I was going so fast. One of you begged for my ears
because you could hear the sea in them.
First I planned to steal myself back. I was a mist
on thighs, belly and hips. I’d slept with so many men.
I was with you in the ash-haunted stations of Poland,
I was with you on that grey plaza in Berlin
while you wolfed three doughnuts without stopping,
thinking yourself alone. Soon I recovered my lips
by waiting behind the mirror while you shaved.
You pouted. I peeled away kisses like wax
no longer warm to the touch. Then
I flew off.
Next I decided to become a virgin. Without a body
it was easy to make up a new story. In seven years
every invisible cell would be renewed
and none of them would have touched any of you.
I went to a cold lake, to a grey-lichened island,
I was gold in the wallet of the water.
I was known to the inhabitants, who were in love
with the coveted whisper of my virginity:
all too soon they were bringing me coffee and perfume,
cash under stones. I could really do something for them.
Thirdly I tried marriage to a good husband
who knew my past but forgave it. I believed in the power
of his penis to smoke out all those men
so that bit by bit my body service would resume,
although for a while I’d be the one woman in the world
who was only present in the smile of her vagina.
He stroked the air where I might have been.
I turned to the mirror and saw mist gather
as if someone lived in the glass. Recovering
I breathed to myself, ‘Hold on! I’m coming.’
Holiday to Lonely
He’s going on holiday to lonely
but no one knows. He has got the sunblock
the cash and the baseball cap
Out of the Blue Page 13
