Date: 2017-04-27 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Poetry
Description: COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 Winner of the 2017 Costa Poetry Award. To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead – the underworld and the human living world – and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage. Inside the Wave , Helen Dunmore's tenth and final book of poetry, followed The Malarkey (2012), whose title-poem won the National Poetry Competition. Her other books include Glad of These
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Rights: Helen Dunmore 2017

HELEN DUNMORE

INSIDE THE WAVE

To be alive is to be inside the wave, always travelling until it breaks and is gone. These poems are concerned with the borderline between the living and the dead – the underworld and the human living world – and the exquisitely intense being of both. They possess a spare, eloquent lyricism as they explore the bliss and anguish of the voyage.

Inside the Wave is Helen Dunmore’s tenth and final poetry book, her first since The Malarkey (2012), whose title-poem won the National Poetry Competition. Her other books include Glad of These Times (2007) and Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001).

Cover photograph by Helen Dunmore

HELEN DUNMORE

Inside the Wave

for Susan Glickman

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications and websites where some of these poems first appeared: Acumen, The Guardian, Hwaet! 20 Years of Ledbury Poetry Festival, ed. Mark Fisher (Bloodaxe Books/Ledbury Poetry Festival, 2016), London Magazine, 1914: Poetry Remembers, ed. Carol Ann Duffy (Faber & Faber, 2014), 100 Prized Poems: twenty-five years of the Forward Books, ed. William Sieghart (Faber & Faber, 2016), and The Poetry Review.

Several of the poems were broadcast on The Verb (BBC Radio 3). ‘Hold out your arms’ was published in The Guardian and read on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row.

CONTENTS

Title page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Counting Backwards
The Underworld
Shutting the Gate
In Praise of the Piano
Re-opening the old mines
Inside the Wave
Odysseus to Elpenor
Plane tree outside Ward 78
The shaft
Leave the door open
My life’s stem was cut
The Bare Leg
The Place of Ordinary Souls
My daughter as Penelope
The Lamplighter
The Halt
Bluebell Hollows
A Loose Curl
Hornsea, 1952
Festival of stone
A Bit of Love
Winter Balcony with Dunnocks
Mimosa
Nightfall in the IKEA Kitchen
The Duration
At the Spit
Terra Incognita
Four cormorants, one swan
Girl in the Blue Pool
February 12th 1994

What shall I do for my sister in the day she shall be spoken for?

In Secret
All the breaths of your life
Her children look for her
Little papoose
Cliffs of Fall
Five Versions from Catullus
1  Through Babel of Nations
2  Undone
3  Sirmio
4  Dedication
5  Sparrow
Rim
On looking through the handle of a cup
Ten Books
Subtraction
My people
September Rain
Hold out your arms
About the Author
Copyright

Counting Backwards

Untroubled, the anaesthetist

Potters with his cannula

As the waterfall in the ante-room

Grows steadily louder,

All of them are cool with it

And just keep on working

No wonder they wear Wellingtons –

I want to ask them

But it seems stupid, naive,

Even attention-seeking.

Basalt, I think, the rock

Where the white stream leaps.

Imagine living at such volume

Next door to a waterfall,

Stepping in and out of the noise

In their funny clothes.

But you can get used to anything

Like the anaesthetist

Counting to himself

Backwards, all wrong.

The Underworld

And besides, we might play cards:

Those slapdash games you once taught me

Which any fool can remember

Or from the fabric which has been tied

With string, wrapped in brown paper

Put away in the highest cupboard

Since the time the children were young

And everyone’s children were young

I might make new curtains

And hem them all by hand.

I used to be so afraid of failing

To grasp the moment, the undertone,

To look foolish in the eyes of anyone

But now I like the patter of cards

The lazy sandwich that falls open

Halfway to the mouth,

The refills in a thumbed glass

The way people get up, yawn,

Go stiff-legged to the window, wondering

That it isn’t yet tomorrow

It’s a long way from here to the river:

I like to see the fish come in

But the game is still on.

From the way the cards are falling

I’d say you will win.

I used to think it was a narrow road

From here to the underworld

But it’s as broad as the sun.

I say to you: I have more acquaintance

Among the dead than the living

And I am not pretending.

It’s pure fact, like this sandwich

Which hasn’t quite tempted anyone.

Shutting the Gate

A barefoot girl hugs the wall

On tiptoe, her instep

Arched like a cat’s back.

Nearby a car revs.

She looks at me and smiles

Like a primary-school child.

Her friend smokes by the gate

One hand on the wall.

Lissom as lilies, they shake dark curls

And watch the car.

I say: Are you girls all right?

And she says: We don’t like

The look of them. Two men

In the dark of the car, also smoking.

She swings the gate shut.

They might be my daughters –

A little older, I reckon –

But those men don’t look

Much like the sons of anyone.

It’s late, almost two a.m.

They are both inside the gate

With one shoe-strap broken

A packet of cigarettes

Brief lovely dresses.

I ask: Will you be all right?

They don’t want to come inside,

They just didn’t like the gate open

When those men were waiting

Like that, with the engine going

And from time to time a rev

So we don’t forget.

In Praise of the Piano

In praise of the piano that slips out of tune

I raise my needle from the dusty record

And watch the vinyl turn and turn,

In praise of the unrepeatable, the original,

The one thought clinging to the one word

I dip my nib into the inkwell,

In praise of the only known photograph

Of your great-grandmother, I hoard

Film, blackout, developing bath.

O needle jumping on dusty vinyl

O letter stuffed in dirty pigeonhole

The fragile, the original

The one word before the blot falls.

Finger ballet on the telephone switchboard,

The one word that flows from the lips

And the one heart by which it is heard

Unrepeatable, fragile. In praise

Of all that cleaves to the note, then slips

From it, and never stays.

Re-opening the old mines

But you would have to go below

The bare bright surface. And I suppose

Out of the dark would come marching

Men with tattoos

Of dust on their forearms,

And as for the gorse burning its own fuse

Or the boy who drops to his knees

Shuffling along his seam

Towards the pock of an explosion

Heard from above, miles out

In the fishing grounds,

He’s in the shop, serving

Eighty flavours of ice cream.

Drip drip goes brown water

Into the shaft while harebells quiver.

Under the houses there’s a cavern

So deep that when the camera

Was lowered it swung pendulum

While the void kept opening

But I suppose that in the veiny dark

Tunnels that knit the rock

They are still blasting,

And ponies which never see the light

Snuff sugar and are content

As may be among the rare metals:

Antimony, molybdenum,

Wolframite, uranium

Gold, silver and indium.

Inside the Wave

And when at last the voyage was over

The ship docked and the men paid off,

The crew became a scattering

Dotted, unremarkable,

In houses along the hill top

Where the lamps flared in welcome

And then grew dim, where a woman turned

As it from habit to the wall.

In the bronze mirror there was a woman

Combing what was left of her hair

And beside her, grimacing,

A dirty old mariner.

He swore and knocked back the chair.

Yes, then Odysseus opened his mouth

And all that was left

Was the sound an old man makes

Between a laugh and a cough.

His toenails were goat’s hooves

His hair a wild

Nest of old stories,

He straddled the tiles

As a man of the sea does

But she would not touch

His barnacled lips.

From the fountain, pulse by pulse

Came gouts of blood.

Everything stayed as it was,

There was no unravelling

Of wake behind him,

No abandoning

Unwanted memories and men.

Besides, the earth stank.

He went down to the black rock

Where the sea pours

And the white sand blows,

He turned his back to the land

And thought of nothing

For the voyage was over,

The ship dragged by a chain

Onto the ramp for inspection.

The waves turned and turned

Neither toward nor away from him,

Swash and backwash

Crossing, repeating,

But never the same.

At the lip of the wave, foam

Stuttered and broke,

It was on the inside

Of the wave he chose

To meditate endlessly

Without words or song,

And so he lay down

To watch it at eye-level,

About to topple

About to be whole.

Odysseus to Elpenor

But tell me, Elpenor

Now that I have conjured you

From those caverns so deep

No camera can fathom them

Now you have come to drink the wine

Poured on the ground in libation

And slake your fleshless appetite

On the snuff of blood,

Tell me how you came here

Fleeing like a cloud shadow

Over restless water –

You frighten me, Elpenor.

Look, I have drawn my sword

Are you not afraid?

You were a handsome fighter –

Will you come on?

Take the heat of my hand

Elpenor, between your palms.

Bow your head for a blessing

Houseless boy, and now tell me

How you came to die.

We are not heroes, any of us,

Only familiars

Of grey shores and the sea-pulse,

Laggards, like the tide.

Was it you, Elpenor

Who rowed when the wind died

Until your hands bled?

You fell asleep in Circe’s house

Drunk, like all of us,

Playing the fool

As you plunged from the roof.

When your neck broke

We were already racing

Down to the harbour

Where our black ship quivered,

Even when our sails filled

And we scudded before the wind

We could not catch your shadow.

We had left you behind

But you are ahead of us

Waiting, unpropitiated

Poor boy, unburied

Come to lap at the blood.

Dawn pushes away night’s curtain

Your body must be burned

And your hair tied with ribbons

As a remembrance.

You ask me in the name of my son

Not to let you be forgotten

But to build your grave mound

Where the pebbles meet the tide

‘And thrust into its heart my oar

So that I may row myself forever.’

Plane tree outside Ward 78

The tree outside the window

Is lost and gone,

Billow of leaf in the summer dark,

A buffet of rain.

I might owe this tree to morphine,

I might wake in the morning

To find it dissolved, paper

Hung in water,

Nothing to do with dreams.

I cannot sleep.

Pain is yards away

Held off like bad weather,

In the ward’s beautiful contentment

Freed by opiates.

Hooked to oxygen

We live for the moment.

The shaft

I don’t need to go to the sun –

It lies on my pillow.

Without movement or speech

Day deepens its sweetness.

Sea shanties from the water,

A brush of traffic,

But it’s quiet here.

Who would have thought that pain

And weakness had such gifts

Hidden in their rough hearts?

Leave the door open

Leave the door open! We cheep and command

From the shared double bed or from the cot

With bars that make tigers out of the dark.

We want the fume and coil of your cigarettes,

The smoke that has embraced us from birth,

The click of your footsteps on the wooden landing,

The wedge of light that parts us from the dark

As I hold, hold to it like a sword.

Leave the door open. Go downstairs, go out

After priming the neighbours to listen,

Go to your world: the cider-bottle cap

Askew on its stem, the pellucid gin,

The ashtray overflowing with stubs,

Radio laughter and suppressed voices

As you creak upstairs without waking us,

But don’t forget to leave the light on

So the spill of it falls where it must.

We can breathe now in our coffin of sheets

So tangled we can’t get out of them,

As long as you leave the door open.

My life’s stem was cut

My life’s stem was cut,

But quickly, lovingly

I was lifted up,

I heard the rush of the tap

And I was set in water

In the blue vase, beautiful

In lip and curve,

And here I am

Opening one petal

As the tea cools.

I wait while the sun moves

And the bees finish their dancing,

I know I am dying

But why not keep flowering

As long as I can

From my cut stem?

The Bare Leg

There we sat in the clattering dark

As the carriages swayed downhill

Under London’s invisible rivers,

There our faces were mute

With a day of burdens

As we recovered ourselves,

Some read star signs from a column

In a left-behind newspaper,

Some sighed and shut their eyes.

When the train came to a halt

For nothing in the dark of the tunnel

We breathed out silence

And when the voice came

Lulling with news of a red signal

We sighed again and rolled our eyes

Or adjusted our standing positions

To lean into one another more gently

And if we had room to turn our heads

We looked down the long corridor

Of carriages aligned

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:

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

Harbouring 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

For fifteen summers, before he grew too old

For French cricket, shrimping and rock pools.

Here is the place where he built his dam

Year after year. See, the stream still comes down

Just as it did, and spreads itself on the sand

Into a dozen channels. How he enlisted them:

Those splendid spades, those sun-bonneted girls

Furiously shoring up the ramparts.

Here they are on the beach, just as they were

Those fifteen summers. She has a rough towel

Ready for him. The boy was always last out of the water.

She would rub him down hard, chafe him like a foal

Up on its legs for an hour and trembling, all angles.

She would dry carefully between his toes.

Here they are on the beach, the two of them

Sitting on the same square of mackintosh,

The same tartan rug. Quality lasts.

There are children in the water, and mothers patrolling

The sea’s edge, calling them back

From the danger zone beyond the breakers.

How her heart would stab when he went too far out.

Once she flustered into the water, shouting

Until he swam back. He was ashamed of her then.

Wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t look at her even.

Her skirt was sopped. She had to wring out the hem.

She wonders if Father remembers.

Later, when they’ve had their sandwiches

She might speak of it. There are hours yet.

Thousands, by her reckoning.

At the Spit

If you lie down at the Spit on this warm

But sunless afternoon, here on the pebbles,

Smelling the wrack and sea-blown plastic,

If you squint at the clouds that sag on the horizon

Without bringing rain or allowing the sun,

If you lie down here in the hollow

And take your backpack for a pillow

And watch how the pebbles lose colour

And then, shutting your eyes, listen,

You’ll hear the tide swell and the wrack dry

To fool’s balloons, incurably saline

Crackling under the weight of your backpack

As you lie down,

If you lie down and as they say do nothing

You’ll hear the tongue of the tide licking

The Spit – O fine appetite! – You’ll hear the click

And tumble of pebbles, slumbrous

Geography shifting: this is the land mass

And this the plastic, the wrack, the mess

To pick over in search of a home. Go back,

It’s late and the unseen sun’s dropping

Hurts the clouds and turns them to rain.

Drowsy, at home, you lie and dream

Of longboats and long-shed blood

Of corner shops and running for sweets –

O sweet familiarity, geography

Melting into the known –

Terra Incognita

And now we come to the unknown land

With its blue coves and inlets where sweet water

Bubbles against the salt. Its sand

Is ready for footprints. Give me your hand

Onto the rock where the seaweed clings

And the red anemone throbs in its crevice

Through swash and backwash. These things

Various as the brain’s comb and the tide’s swing

Or the first touch of untouched terrain

On our footsoles, as the land explores us,

Have become our fortune. Let me explain

Which foods are good to eat, and which poison.

Four cormorants, one swan

The swans go up with slow wing-beats

That strike off from the surface of the water.

Even the most absorbed games-player

Deep in his mobile, looks up at the clatter

Of six swans’ wings.

After the swans have patrolled their harbour

They settle singly. One drifts with the current

To the house-boat window that always opens,

Another sails towards two cormorants

Hanging out their wings

And two coosing, or fishing

In the shallows beside the jetty.

Now the whole afternoon hangs

In the balance between four cormorants

And a single swan, approaching.

The first cormorant pratfalls from its perch

In an ungainly bundle of wings

Or so it seems. But no, it is flying

Arrowlike to a fish a hundred yards off.

A lover could not be more direct.

Girl in the Blue Pool

Years back and full of echoes.

Chlorine, urine, raucous

Cuff of voices on broken surface.

A boy on the edge rowdily teeters

And you, knees flexed, arms back

Are on the pulse of your stroke. Suppose

It is you, now, in the pink bikini, close

To making five hundred metres

As the ceiling splinters with echoes.

Suppose you touch the tiles on the turn

And vanish. The churn

Of bubbles streams at your heels

While you shake water out of your ears

To catch the voice of your instructor

Who paces you, outpaces you

On the blue-wet tiles. How her voice echoes.

You should not be wearing a bikini

And you were slow on the turn.

I am years back and full of echoes.

The silver stream where you swim

Has long ago been swallowed,

But at your temples the lovely hollows

Play in June light. Suppose

There is one length left in you, knees flexed

Arms back. Chlorine, urine, raucous

Voices on shattered surface. If that boy topples

You too will go down.

February 12th 1994

No one else remembers that room

With the blood pressure cuff and the plastic cot

And the bag on its stand dripping

Millilitre by millilitre

When the visitors had gone home

And the tyres six storeys down

Skidded, infrequent.

Snow on the window ticked

The glass, becoming sleet

And the sheets for all their stains were white.

No one else remembers that room

Where you cried each time the lights

Went off and the nurses were absent

For hours by morphia time,

I reached for you in pain

And lifted you in your hospital nightgown

To wedge you against me

For we were both falling

You with purple, dangling limbs

Ecstatic, all lips

And quick, hot breathing,

I watching a nurse who did not exist

Write her hieroglyphics

As the snow thickened.

I made a vow to you then

In our solitude

That you would never remember,

With two fingers I smoothed the ruck

Of the gown against your back.

What shall I do for my sister in the day she shall be spoken for?

I have a little sister, she has no breasts.

I buy her face covering at the shop

Where they have nearly run out.

So, we are lucky. Black cloth sucks

Into her nostrils. My sister screams.

When she’s finished saying she can’t breathe

When I’ve cleaned the snot from her face

And rearranged her so she’ll be safe

I say: It’s for your own good.

Do as I do and walk close.

I have a little sister, she has no breasts.

She would like to be an ophthalmologist.

When she was three she had a cyst

Removed from under her left eyelid.

I say: Don’t cry, you can still see out.

I tell her to walk between me and the wall

And keep her eyes downward. We scuttle

Like crabs in a black wrapping.

We shall buy rice, we shall go home.

What shall I do for my sister

In the day when she shall be spoken for?

In Secret

And this is where they met in secret.

Follow my pointing finger. Now you see it

Quite empty. Those curtains that veiled it

Are rags, and the bed stripped bare.

Here she played for him, there

He placed his shoes in the corner.

Piano from an upstairs room,

Wanton extravagance of scales falling

As we imagine birdsong –

But only slow it down

And hear the gong-repeat of a rhythm

Like the treading of rubble over a woman.

All the breaths of your life

There is a gargoyle look when the mouth caves.

No more words can be hoped for, the lips

Are not for speaking, the tongue

Is all sag and distortion.

I might think that your kindness is effaced.

No more look can be hoped for, your eyes

Are not for seeing, the skin

Is a drawn curtain over them.

I hear your breath, now failing

As all the breaths of your life become

Petals endlessly opening

Inward, where the dark is.

Her children look for her

Life and death are in the hands of God she said

As a boat is in the hands of the dark water,

And now her children look for her

In the zizz of her sewing-machine each evening

And the smell of cardamom.

She said: life and death are in the hands of God.

As the sun beat on the roof of the van

She closed her eyes to dream,

And her children look as the Pole Star goes up

Close to the moon.

Little papoose

If I were the moon

With a star papoose

In the windy sky

I’d carry my one star home,

If I were the sea

With boats in my arms

On this cold morning

I’d carry them,

If I were sleeping

And my dream turned

I would carry you

Little papoose

Wherever you choose.

Cliffs of Fall

(to the memory of Gerard Manley Hopkins)

Spring of turf and thrift, tangle of fleece, sheep-shit,

Subtle flowers where honeybees knock

At the foxglove lip and the gorse trap

Then sheer on our left the drop. Spatter of bracken hooks

Misleading the lambs. In the bank, marsh violets

Wet, lovely, minute. We need not look for the fall, the chink

Of pebble that tumbles. All the grey scree stirs

Slip-rattles and stills itself. Here is the slope’s

Angle, implacable. Here’s where you look

Touch, unbalance, dislodge. Infinite drop

Where the bee burrs at the foxglove’s lip,

All quick-tongued, intimate.

Time to step back to the wide margin

Cleave to the path’s dapper attention

Unspring each poem,

Pitch each new note to the key of loss,

Lose nothing. Stay clear of the drop

Where the world bursts through its dirty glass.

Sun on your neck, a dazzle of violets

Infinitely slipsliding –

No quick wing-beat of flight, but a slope

Of gravel-rubble, its angle implacable
stripping you raw. From here your fall

Is a matter of form: a slow marvel.

Five Versions from Catullus

1  Through Babel of Nations

Through babel of nations and waste of water

I come my brother. What are these rites to us?

Your ashes are speechless

My words falter.

Blind fate has taken you, brother,

You and I are undone.

The wine I bring you is spoiled

With the salt of parting –

What else can I give?

Only a last greeting.

2  Undone

What you have done to me has undone me.

You have led me so far from myself

That my mind loses its bearings.

Even if you shape-shifted

To your best and dearest

I couldn’t care for it. Dark love drives me on.

3  Sirmio

Almost island and jewel of all islands

In lakes stiller than thought or in wild oceans

Sweet or salt as the sea-god makes them,

Sirmio,

I see you, all of you, I take you in

I see you, barely believing

I’ve left those featureless, endless Bithynian plains.

We travel over many waters

To reach home-coming,

Struggle and suffering over, the mind dissolved

Of all its troubles, burdens laid down –

The soft bed waits for our exhaustion.

I see you, all of you, I know your

Confusion of ripples against the lakeshore

Welcoming laughter

The sounds of home

Ringing like masts in harbour:

Sirmio.

4  Dedication

My slim volume, polished almost to nothing –

Shall I dedicate it to you, Cornelius?

You thought something of my songs

Even though you were the only man in Italy

Who could wrap up the world in three tomes

Of flawless erudition.

My God, your learning and labour

Lean heavily against my little volume,

So take my book, this fingernail’s width

For what it’s worth.

5  Sparrow

Sparrow, my girl’s delight

And plaything held to her breast,

Sparrow whom she teases with one finger

Daring your littleness to peck harder –

Sparrow, I burn for her

And crave the smallest crumb

As the pair of you play

Folded together in rapture

Under one wing.

I too long to comfort her

In grief or oppressive longing –

If only I could play with her as you do

Until she forgets her soul’s sadness.

Rim

Here is the bowl. Do I want it still

Chipped as it is and crazed,

Its lustrous cream no longer running

Over the body in fleet glaze,

I’m getting rid, getting shot, cleansing

Dark cupboards and fossil-deep

Drawers lined with historic newspaper.

I stop to read about the three-day-week.

Here are gewgaws with tarnished clasps

Here is the gravy-boat, the one item

Surviving from the wedding service.

Here’s Ted Heath’s improbable grin.

I flick the rim and it gives back a tang –

Yes, I remember that, the exact sound

Of early curiosity and boredom.

Bowl on my palm, I twist it round

And round again, unsure.

Do I hold or let it fall?

On looking through the handle of a cup

On looking through the handle of a cup

I spied a nest of green: the spout

Minus the can, a bunch of leaves

Big as my hand: two trees

In the palm of the wind,

On looking through the hole made by a pin

In a plane leaf twirled

All ways to catch the world

I saw a drop of rain, swollen

On the petal of a rose,

On looking through the fault in my eyes

With their arrhythmias of vision

I saw what no one has seen:

My cup-handle of a world,

My pinhole morning.

Ten Books

Jacketless, buckled, pressed from the voyage,

Ten books that once were crated to America

And back again,

That have known the salt sea’s swing under them,

Oil stink, the deep throb of the engines

And quick hands putting them back on the shelves.

Spines torn, the paper wartime, the Faber

Font squarish and the dates in Roman:

The Waste Land and other poems,

Poems Newly Selected, Siegfried Sassoon –

How that name conjured with me

As a soldier kicked at a dead man.

MacNeice, freckled with brown

From many damps in many different houses.

On the inner page, under my father’s autograph

An early flourish of blue crayon

Where I scribbled a figure so primitive

There are not even legs for it to walk upon.

Bowed, chipped, darkening, edge-worn

Sunned, loose, fading

Binding copy, reading copy, shaken:

Ten books that I have taken.

From the balcony on an August morning

I see the rest fly to the tip lorry

Where the sofa for a moment reposes

Legs in the air, grinning.

It is soaked through with music

But nothing will save it.

Behind it the sea makes the usual silveriness,

The café opens and the bikes whizz

From end to end of the promenade.

Meanwhile in my father’s hand, a quotation

On the title page of Herbert Read’s

Thirty-Five Poems: ‘I absorbed Blake,

His strange beauty, his profound message,

His miraculous technique, and to emulate

Blake was to be my ambition

And my despair…’ (Faber and Faber,

24 Russell Square.) I see my own hands

Smooth and small as they are not now

Lifting, turning, ‘I am amazed

To find how much I owe to him.’

Subtraction

You always thought that you’d die mid-stride,

Sun on your left hand, darkness

Crossing you out in one swipe.

When you got on to subtraction

It was easy-peasy. Add one

At the top, take one from the next column.

Good at take-away, good at adding,

Revving up for the 11-plus

But no mathematician,

You stumbled upon infinity

With infinite terror, and knew

The limits of divinity –

What you’d been told was wrong.

If all you loved had been given

Then all could be taken.

You knew then that you must blot

In the blue notebook, trim

With happy pencil, the sum

Of what is when it is not.

My people

My people are the dying,

I am of their company

And they are mine,

We wake in the wan hour

Between three and four,

Listen to the rain

And consider our painkillers.

I lie here in the warm

With four pillows, a light

And the comfort of my phone

On which I sometimes compose,

And the words come easily

Bubbling like notes

From a bird that thinks it is dawn.

My people are the dying.

I reach out to them,

A company of suffering.

One falls by the roadside

And a boot stamps on him,

One lies in her cell, alone,

Without tenderness

Brutally handled

Towards her execution.

I can do nothing.

This is my vigil: the lit candle,

The pain, the breath of my people

Drawn in pain.

September Rain

Always rain, September rain,

The slipstream of the season,

Night of the equinox, the change.

There are three surfers out back.

Now the rain’s pulse is doubled, the wave

Is not to be caught. Are they lost in the dark

Do they know where the coast is combed with light

Or is there only the swell, lifting

Back to the beginning

When they ran down the hill like children

Through this rain, September rain,

And the sea opened its breast to them?

I lie and listen

And the life in me stirs like a tide

That knows when it must be gone.

I am on the deep deep water

Lightly held by one ankle

Out of my depth, waiting.

Hold out your arms

Death, hold out your arms for me

Embrace me

Give me your motherly caress,

Through all this suffering

You have not forgotten me.

You are the bearded iris that bakes its rhizomes

Beside the wall,

Your scent flushes with loveliness,

Sherbet, pure iris

Lovely and intricate.

Death, you heap into my arms

A basket of unripe damsons

Red crisscross straps that button behind me.

I don’t know about school,

My knowledge is for papery bud covers

Tall stems and brown

Bees touching here and there, delicately

Before a swerve to the sun.

Death stoops over me

Her long skirts slide,

She knows I am shy.

Even the puffed sleeves on my white blouse

Embarrass me,

She will pick me up and hold me

So no one can see me,

I will scrub my hair into hers.

There, the iris increases

Note by note

As the wall gives back heat.

Death, there’s no need to ask:

A mother will always lift a child

As a rhizome

Must lift up a flower

So you settle me

My arms twining,

Thighs gripping your hips

Where the swell of you is.

As you push back my hair

– Which could do with a comb

But never mind –

You murmur

‘We’re nearly there.’

(25 May 2017)

About the Author

Helen Dunmore (1952–2017) was a poet, novelist, short story and children’s writer. Her poetry books have been given the Poetry Book Society Choice and Recommendations, Cardiff International Poetry Prize, Alice Hunt Bartlett Award and Signal Poetry Award, and Bestiary was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her poem ‘The Malarkey’ won the 2010 National Poetry Competition.

After making her debut with The Apple Fall in 1983, Helen Dunmore published all her poetry with Bloodaxe Books. Her earlier work is available in Out of the Blue: Poems 1975-2001 (2001), which was followed by Glad of These Times (2007), The Malarkey (2012), and Inside the Wave (2017), her tenth and last collection.

She published twelve novels and three books of short stories with Penguin, including A Spell of Winter (1995), winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, Talking to the Dead (1996), The Siege (2001), Mourning Ruby (2003), House of Orphans (2006) and The Betrayal (2010), as well as The Greatcoat (2012) with Hammer, and The Lie (2014), Exposure (2016) and Birdcage Walk (2017) with Hutchinson.

Copyright

Copyright © Helen Dunmore 2017

First published 2017 by
Bloodaxe Books Ltd,
Eastburn,
South Park,
Hexham,
Northumberland NE46 1BS.

This ebook first published in 2017.

www.bloodaxebooks.com
For further information about Bloodaxe titles
please visit our website or write to
the above address for a catalogue.

Cover design: Neil Astley & Pamela Robertson-Pearce.

The right of Helen Dunmore to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN: 978 1 78037 359 1 ebook