Inside the Wave

by Helen Dunmore

  As if the driver had drawn them

  Onto the straight, and left them perfect

  And in the next-to-one carriage

  Less crowded than our own

  A bare leg stretched into the aisle

  Taking up room

  As if this were a beach in summer.

  We studied the delicate anatomy

  Of shin and knee

  The putting together and planting

  Of toe and heel

  The tension of thigh,

  And beyond it nothing

  For the body was hidden

  By the bulk of a boy

  Inopportunely leaning

  To adjust his headphones.

  As if this were a beach in summer

  The leg took its own time

  And flexed luxuriously

  While the signal held against us

  And delay surged into time

  Lost, irrecoverable.

  The driver told us again

  We would be on the move shortly

  But no one believed him.

  This was what we had always known

  Was about to happen: the calf tightening

  The vessel of the hip cupping

  The thrust of the bare leg,

  The naked precision of the human

  As it steps into action,

  And down the long corridor, swaying

  As the train resumed,

  The chant, the murmur

  Of foot soles, someone

  Merely walking into the next room.

  The Place of Ordinary Souls

  In such meadows the days pass

  Without shadow, unremarkable.

  On time, the bus pants at its halt,

  Passengers peel their thighs

  From hot vinyl, and step down.

  Swift-heeled Achilles strides

  Through the fields of asphodel

  Flanked by heroes and warriors

  Who have left their mark on the earth

  And want nothing to do with us.

  With impatient glance at the starry fields

  And kit on their backs, they’re gone

  Route-marching to Elysium

  Where the gods are at home.

  We are glad to see the back of them.

  In the fields of asphodel we dawdle

  Towards the rumour of a beauty spot

  Which turns out to be shut.

  No matter. Why not get out the picnic

  And see if the tea’s still hot?

  The bus shuttles all day long

  With its cargo of ordinary souls.

  We lie on our backs, eyes closed,

  Dreaming of nothing while clouds pass.

  (According to Greek legend, ordinary, unheroic souls pass the afterlife in the fields of asphodel.)

  My daughter as Penelope

  Seven years old last birthday,

  With waist-length hair,

  White tunic, yellow ribbon

  Threaded at neck and hem,

  She has learned her lines,

  The chalked-in positions,

  The music which means

  She must come out of the wings.

  In the dusty cave of the theatre

  The children’s bare feet patter.

  My daughter thrusts out her arm

  And beats her suitors,

  In pride at the laughter

  She forgets the pause,

  But chides them, berates them

  Like an abandoned woman

  Who has over cold years learned

  To preserve the hearth.

  Odysseus, so long expected

  Would scarcely be welcome –

  A man of many distractions

  At this very moment

  Oblivious of her

  Conjuring the dead with blood.

  My daughter as Penelope

  Shakes back her hair and cries

  That they should all go home

  Here they will get nothing,

  While the little capering boys

  Evade her blows.

  I made her tunic, I threaded

  Those ribbons at neck and hem,

  I brushed and loosened her hair.

  She leaned against my shoulder

  In pure naïvety. ‘I didn’t know

  You could make anything

  As good as this,’ she said.

  The theatre swallowed the child.

  We thought they were too young for it,

  They would freeze, or be afraid,

  But they were blithe, barefoot,

  Running from the underworld

  To butt like kids against the white sheet

  That marked the kingdom of the dead.

  The skin rose on our arms

  The hairs prickled. They’d gone.

  My daughter as Penelope

  Seven years old, thrusting

  Her bare arm out of her chiton

  Pushing away her suitors

  As one may do in childhood.

  The sheet quivered

  For the dead could barely contain

  Their desire for the living

  And the play was long.

  The cave of the stage grew vast –

  A mouth without a tongue

  Consuming our children.

  The Lamplighter

  Here, where the old Industrial School was

  And then the porn-film sheds,

  Stands the last lamp before the water.

  Dead as he’s been these ninety years

  The lamplighter on his beat

  Walks with ladder on shoulder.

  Above the Mardyke Steps and the donkey track

  He fixes ladder to pole, stands back

  Then climbs nimbly into the mass of flower.

  His head is a ball of petals. He barely coughs

  As the soft skin of petunia

  Plasters itself against his nostrils.

  Now he takes up his torch

  Tips the lever and touches the gas.

  A big rude flower, a dahlia

  Blooms in its case.

  There are boys slouched against the wall

  Up to no good, there are white-faced girls

  Running to the shop for a paper of chips.

  There’s the long fall of the Mardyke Steps

  Tunneling the bad way to the docks

  And so the lamplighters muster

  To stop the thieves who can knock you down

  Between one lamp and the next,

  Between one step and the drop.

  The Halt

  We stop somewhere on the plain

  While I am sleeping. As my book slips

  The man opposite leans to stop it

  Still chomping that sausage he cut

  With a penknife opened and cleaned

  On his sleeve, long before I slept.

  He pulls down the window-strap and at once

  We hear birds scurry in the scrub

  That bows and knits to the cuff of the wind.

  I turn my face to the glass

  For I speak his language painfully

  Sentence by sentence, and he will talk to me.

  We have halted for no reason

  In the white glare of noon

  At this shack surrounded by sunflowers

  Pothering hens and a plot of maize

  Beyond which the land gallops unbroken.

  There is also a woman

  Who swings a bucket on her arm

  As she clambers the makeshift platform

  Box upon box, skilfully placed.

  She knows all the long curve of the train.

  Now from the engine a stoker swings

  A stream of water that dings on the iron.

  The rails flash so I can barely look at them.

  Our engine shucks steam as it canters

  Panting, pulling against the brake.

  The bucket clangs. The woman steps down.

  From my sticky mouth the words come:
r />   Hens, maize, sunflowers,

  Her bowed head and the way she waits.

  Bluebell Hollows

  Are they blue or not blue?

  All I know is the smoke

  That moves under the trees,

  In Tremenheere Woods

  Moths clung to the sheet,

  It was the hour of innocence –

  We developed flowers

  On light-sensitive paper:

  They are still here.

  We could never walk fast enough,

  Seven year olds

  Up in the dead of night

  Climbing to the lookout

  Where bonfires blazed

  For reasons long forgotten,

  But perhaps because the Romans

  Once came this far

  To walk the bluebell hollows.

  A Loose Curl

  I have never known you easily

  Hold my hand as you do now.

  We sit here for hours.

  There’s salt all over the glass

  And however I look to the horizon

  Not a sail to be seen.

  I hold your hand and say nothing.

  Once I must have held

  Your finger, a loose curl.

  You remember in snatches.

  You say you’re afraid of a whale

  Snorkelling through the blue Arctic.

  The ice is so fragile.

  You must spread your weight, like this

  And inch out to the abyss.

  This is not a glacier, it’s only

  A world of ice falling apart.

  I think something is moving slowly

  Deep in your fingers.

  The sea stays in its lair

  But wants to be where we are.

  Hornsea, 1952

  …I by the tide

  Of Humber would complain…

  Yes, but were we happy then?

  The wind blew from the east, you were always cold,

  And there was a boating lake –

  Water trapped on your left, below sea level,

  Murkily waiting to be stirred by boys with sticks.

  You and I must have been conspirators

  All those cold days. The two of us.

  No books, no essays, no bike propped up

  In happy rush. No clangour of bells

  Or notes in pigeon-holes:

  I can’t wait for you, my darling.

  Huge planes take off

  Overhead into loneliness,

  You bake sponge cakes at four o’clock

  For belated homecomings –

  Men drink in the Mess.

  The fortune-teller saw you kneel

  Beside your trunk, packing, unpacking.

  The hour for scholarship came round again:

  You won. You win

  And write Oxford on labels

  Flowingly, beneath your name.

  A small child drags at your hand.

  Another pushes out your belly-button.

  You haul at the pram.

  The two of us. How the wind blows.

  You lose one child and you keep one.

  You will change your accent for no one.

  You could write an essay on this:

  A sozzled officer slow to come home,

  Marvell’s vegetable kingdom,

  World enough and time,

  Another baby fattening

  And your thirtieth birthday on the horizon.

  Festival of stone

  (for Jitka Palmer)

  The chink of hammers is a song

  Like blackbirds interrupted, alarming

  One another in the beauty of the morning

  Over the thud of mallets, raspings on stone

  As the sculptors bend and sweat

  And the skirts of the tents blow out.

  The chink of hammers is the wind that plays

  On plane leaves keyed to a ripple

  In the updraught from the water

  And all is flash and shatter

  As the surface breaks open

  To show the face of the stone.

  A Bit of Love

  He must stir himself. No more hiding

  Behind the skill of hands

  That are not his.

  Those nurses are good girls.

  They’ll do anything for you –

  Within reason of course.

  He must fumble his old fingers

  Get himself moving –

  They all say this.

  Ambulance bells carouse

  Until he doesn’t know where he is.

  Drunks in the street

  Swaying about like Holy Moses

  That’s about the size of it:

  No one listens.

  The lamplighter went home years ago

  There’s no night policeman

  Or dawn milk-chink.

  That stout world is a trinket

  In the eyes of his grandchildren.

  His shifts are over.

  Here’s a bit of paper

  And a book to lean on

  What more does he want?

  In his well-taught hand-writing

  He’ll send her a bit of love

  To make her blush.

  Winter Balcony with Dunnocks

  Close to the earth, creeping, lowly

  Mouse-coloured, unglamorous

  Dunnocks, your dusty wings flirt

  In the dry roots of ivy, you are unnoted

  Untweeted creatures, you turn

  Dry leaves and peck for grubs.

  You come to my balcony, a cloud of you

  Eight floors up and slender-dark

  Tilting your wings to skirt the railing

  And flicker among the geraniums

  As the winter cold comes on –

  Quick, quick, against the dusk.

  You don’t care that someone was here

  Before you: those two fat pigeons

  Dumpily purring, the noisy ones

  Who think I can’t see where they slump

  Between flower-pot and plastic bucket

  Breast to breast, at roost –

  No, you are too quick-dark

  On the rim of night, flickering

  Through the chill buds of the camellia,

  Unnoted, untweeted creatures,

  Dunnocks, foraging

  December and the year’s husk.

  Mimosa

  Why is the mimosa here

  Inside its dark frame?

  So down-to-earth, it comes out workmanlike

  Year after year, breaks its own branches

  With plumes that make the sky quiver.

  Let’s sit here, on the bench, under it

  To rest while you get your breath.

  Winter’s over, and look, in this dustbin

  Someone has planted wallflowers.

  There’s pollen all over your arms.

  Nightfall in the IKEA Kitchen

  Nightfall in the IKEA kitchen.

  Even though the lights are left on

  I feel the push of the wind’s deconstruction

  Take the hull of the shed by storm.

  Creak and strain of test and fault-finding

  But here in the glow I am alone

  Expected and consoled. Here is the notice board

  Riddled with reminders and invitations,

  Here are picture ledges and high cabinets

  Kitchen trolley, drying racks

  A sly shoe cabinet, fabric pocket-ties:

  A life so sweetly cupboarded

  I barely believe it is mine. Open

  And another light comes on.

  Here is the place where I begin again

  As a twenty-three year old Finn

  Taking the keys of her first home.

  I use space well here. I waste nothing.

  The floor clock has shelves, the bed lifts up

  And if I yield and sleep

  I will become part of the storage system

  Harb
ouring dreams and heat.

  Everything is a little below scale

  And therefore ample. Stuva, Dröma

  Expedit, Tromsø, Isfjorden…

  I rock in the peace of their names

  Even as I mispronounce them

  For this is nightfall in the one-bedroom

  Model apartment’s kitchen

  When everyone has gone home

  And there is nothing left

  But the Marketplace itself.

  And say a child is born, no problem.

  With a simple room-divider

  I can create not only child storage

  But also a home office

  From which I will provide for us both.

  Look, here is his football on the floor

  And here a shelf where it may be stored.

  His whole life is in these drawers.

  Call him Billy and see him run.

  When he grows up and moves out

  Just take down the partition

  To have, at last, my own space again.

  Ten thousand times the wind has pushed the doors

  But they have not opened yet.

  Those cupboards. Stockholm. Yes, that green

  Nature can never quite get.

  The Duration

  Here they are are on the beach where the boy played