Counting Backwards
Page 20
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.
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
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 about 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
and a woman came and took water from the well
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.
Our family, swimming again
Our family, swimming again.
Slick lily-ropes, flat as gelled hair,
pull under the surface.
The four lads with an army feel to them
grin and are gone
leaving the splash of their voices
like a high-water-mark, drying
on the concrete landing-stage
where we splay and bake in the sun.
My husband says he’s standing on sand
and can touch its clean ribs with his feet,
but I hang, vertical,
sleeved with the cold, my mouth level
with the smooth purl of the current
like yards of candy being pulled,
while in a hospital core
sticky as the inside of wedding-cake,
snail-vaulted ear-walls
fill up with electricity.
This current’s for hauling us off
by the hair, making it flow upright.
Yes, but I might
yet side-slip or trick it.
For all the cover my clothes give
I may as well swim naked.
A physiotherapist sighs with the heat
as she bends, unplaiting the tendons
healed wrong in my father’s feet.
He hears her dap off down the corridor
then feels in his right-hand drawer
and works away with the polish I gave him
to make a mid-tan gloss on his sandals.
There’s a quick, willowy landscape in yellows
done by the Sinhalese charge-nurse –
but this is not a poem about him.
I like the look of what it’s not.
For a moment out of reach
in my bra with its lace half-off
I’m just swimming unexpectedly
under the vaults of the aqueduct,
kicking free of the lilies
which thrust bare buds inches above me.
My husband calls me to stop.
I tip on my back and stare up
the vaults’ inner greased walls.
There’s a man watching me swim,
one big hand clamped to the parapet,
the other combing for sounds on h
is Walkman.
Sweet pepper
See, you have fallen asleep in spite of me
and my heels going and returning,
with your blankets tucked and your hard-eyed toy dog
wedged under your arm.
In your dream two children are climbing a summer mountain.
They pass the snake-pit, tangled and blue
with smoke of sliding yellow and black snakes –
these will not hurt you. Your brother and Becky
branch like skaters from path fork to path
and so upwards and gone, with the thin girl
driving ahead, and the slower
graceful, compact boy stopped, lingering
over a stand of flowerless balsam.
See, you throw out your hand to the wall
where the children are crying and laughing
after their day lost on the mountain –
but here the sky sweats with excess of rain,
you’re far away from yourself, and I’m
unjamming the window to night air
soaked through with the storm, bruised
fresh as a sweet pepper.
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.