Out of the Blue

by Helen Dunmore

  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.r />
  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