Authors: Helen Dunmore
You came back to life in its sweetness,
to keen articulations of the knee joint,
to slow replays of balls kicking home
and the gape of the goalkeeper.
You came back to life in its sweetness,
to the smell of sweat, the night-blue
unwrinkling of the iris,
and going from table to table at parties.
Perhaps you’ll waltz
on some far-off anniversary
with an elderly woman
who doesn’t exist yet,
and you, you’ll forget,
for now we’re counting in years,
where we were counting in hours.
Deep in busy lizzies and black iron
he sleeps for the Heimat,
and his photograph slips in and out of sight
as if breathing.
There are petals against his cheeks
but he is not handsome.
His small eyes search the graveyard fretfully
and the flesh of his cheeks clouds
the bones of heroism.
No one can stop him being young
and he is so tired of being young.
He would like to feel pain in his joints
as he wanders down to Hübers,
but he’s here as always,
always on his way back from the photographer’s
in his army collar
with a welt on his neck rubbed raw.
The mountains are white and sly as they always were.
Old women feed the graveyard with flowers,
clear the glass on his photograph
with chamois leathers,
bend and whisper the inscription.
They are his terrible suitors.
Here I am in the desert knowing nothing,
here I am knowing nothing
in the desert of knowing nothing,
here I am in this wide
desert long after midnight
here I am knowing nothing
hearing the noise of the rain
and the melt of fat in the pan
here is our man on the phone knowing something
and here’s our man fresh from the briefing
in combat jeans and a clip microphone
testing for sound,
catching the desert rain, knowing something,
here’s the general who’s good with his men
storming the camera, knowing something
in the pit of his Americanness
here’s the general taut in his battledress
and knowing something
here’s the boy washing his kit in a tarpaulin
on a front-line he knows from his GCSE
coursework on Wilfred Owen
and knowing something
here is the plane banking,
the
go
go
go
of adrenalin
the child melting
and here’s the grass that grows overnight
from the desert rain, feeling for him
and knowing everything
and here I am knowing nothing
in the desert of knowing nothing
dry from not speaking.
They are hiding away in the desert,
hiding in sand which is growing warm
with the hot season,
they are hiding from bone-wagons
and troops in protective clothing
who will not look at them,
the crowds were appalled on seeing him,
so disfigured did he look
that he seemed no longer human
.
That killed head straining through the windscreen
with its frill of bubbles in the eye-sockets
is not trying to tell you something –
it is telling you something.
Do not look away,
permit them, permit them –
they are telling their names to the Marines
in one hundred thousand variations,
but no one is counting,
do not turn away,
for God is counting
all of us who are silent
holding our newspapers up, hiding.
That morning when the potato tops rusted,
the mangle rested and the well ran dry
and the turf house leaned like a pumpkin
against the yellow sky
there was a fire lit in the turf house
and a thin noise of crying,
and under the skinny sheets a woman
wadded with cloth against bleeding.
That morning her man went to the fields
after a shy pause at the end of her bed,
trying not to pick out the smell of her blood,
but she turned and was quiet.
All day the yellow sky walked on the turves
and she thought of things heavy to handle,
her dreams sweated with burdens,
the bump and grind of her mangle.
All day the child creaked in her cradle
like a fire as it sinks
and the woman crooned when she was able
across the impossible inches.
At that moment at the horizon there came a horseman
pressed to the saddle, galloping, galloping
fast as the whoop of an ambulance siren –
and just as unlikely. What happened
was slower and all of a piece.
She died. He lived (the man in the fields),
the child got by on a crust
and lived to be thirty, with sons. In the end
we came to be born too. Just.
The Our Father, the moment of fear.
He dodged round us and ran,
but was fetched back again
to stand before us on the platform.
The Our Father, the moment of fear
as the fist gripped and he hung
from the headmaster’s arm,
doubling on the spot like a rabbit
blind for home.
The Our Father, the moment of fear.
The watch he’d stolen was given
back to its owner, dumb
in the front row, watching the strapping.
The Our Father, the moment of fear.
The strap was old and black and it cracked
on belly buttock and once across his lip
because he writhed and twisted.
He would not stand and take it.
The Our Father, the moment of fear.
There was a lot of sun
leaking through churchy windows
onto a spurt of urine.
After an age of watching
we sang the last hymn.
This path is silky with dust
where a lizard balances across bracken fronds
and a brown butterfly opens wide
to the stroke of the sun,
where a trawler feels its way along the sandbanks
and two yachts, helplessly paired, tack far out
like the butterflies which have separated and gone quiet.
A wild damson tree bulges with wasps
among heaps that are not worth picking,
and there a branch splits white with the lightning
of too heavy a harvest.
The lizard is gone in a blink.
Its two-pronged tail – half withered, half growing –
flicks out of the sun.
For a moment the pulse in its throat
keeps the grass moving.
A grass-bound offering of yarrow,
rosebay willow herb and veined convolvulus
lies to one side of the path
as if someone’s coming back.
Instead, the sift of the dust –
beneath the bracken these hills are full of adders.
In the white sheets I gave you
everything I am capable of –
at the wrong time
of the month we opened
to the conception,
you were dewed like a plum
when at two a.m.
you reached under the bed
for a drink of water adrift
in yesterday’s clothes,
our sheets were a rope
caught between our thighs,
we might easily have died
but we kept on climbing.
The white receiver
slides up my vagina,
I turn and you’ve come,
though I’m much too old for this
and you’re much too young.
That’s the baby
says the radiographer.
You are eight millimetres long
and pulsing,
bright in the centre of my much-used womb
which to my astonishment
still looks immaculate.
You are all heart,
I watch you tick and tick
and wonder
what you will come to,
will this be our only encounter
in the white gallery of ultrasound
or are you staying?
One day will we talk about this
moment when I first saw your spaceship
far off, heading for home?
She swam to me smiling, her teeth
pointed by salt water, her mouth
a rock-pool’s spat-out wine gum,
and then the tide flung
over her threshold,
and her lips moved.
The valve of her mouth was plumed
with salt-sweet tendrils,
sea danced from her pelt
of oil and muscle,
she rested her elbows on my pedalo
and there she hung
browning the pads of her shoulders
like a snake in the sun.
On shore thunderhead pines
drifted and swelled
like August umbrellas
stunning the fronts of hotels.
The sharp tide rinsed
over her threshold
as she dived once
and an angler cast
with lightning-proof rod
from the crinkled rocks.
A slow Medusa tilted beneath her,
shadowing toes and ankles
then on with its belly to the south,
braille on its tentacles.
She could read it like a newspaper
as it hunted alongside her.
I shivered
at the roll of her syllables,
and her joined feet winnowing,
and so I trawled her with me
over a shallow forest of dog-jawed
fruit sucking the trees,
past angler-fish socketing sand
with stone-cold faces,
through shrimps which divided between them
her armpit crevices
then flicked that way and this
tasting the dew of her breasts.
I trawled her past innocent sand
and the spumy outstretched arms
of agar and tangle –
but no, I wouldn’t look down
however she called to me
until my fingers were shrunk
like old laundry.
I did not dare look down
to be snagged by ruby and seal-black
trees relaxing their weave.
On shore nobody’s waiting.
The children, firm and delicious
as morning goods, have sheathed up their spades.
The boy with burned legs
has stepped out of his pantaloons
and skips in his blue vest
on the verandah boards.
The big one lights a mosquito candle,
Dad fills his glass of wine
four times, while they count,
and crickets saw in the ditch, frantic
along with the old car number-plate
and the boys’ jar of fishing maggots.
They are screeching, all of them:
night, night, night’s come
and no one’s ever had a pedalo out this long
.
Night-wind sifts on the shore
where striped recliners and wind-breaks
squeak by the green pavilion
crying for more.
I’ve lost my wife to the sea
Dad thinks hazily,
and takes another bottle of Muscadet
out of the gas cooler,
he imagines her dreaming
and sleeping miles from him,
each breath takes her farther,
toes in the air,
sea claps under her pedalo
impudently happy –
Below me now a mirror of wave-ruts
in firm brown sand,
I’d pulled her with me for miles
and there was nowhere to hide.
Now let me see you swim back
I said. She was mouthing
like mackerel tossed in a bucket
when the man’s too busy to kill it,
with her scale-lapped bathing-hat
fly-blown and crazing.
She had nothing on underneath.
She was bare and bald as an eel.
Now she was an old bathing-woman
a mackintoshed marine Venus,
now she was that girl with lipstick
a push-up bra and a beehive,
now she was a slippery customer at Cannes
bare-breasted and young,
now she was my old
familiar snake again.
I took her curls in my hands and I pulled
but they were limpetted, smiling,
and there were just the two of us rocking.
We were close as spies
and she stayed silent
till day dived after its horizon
and the sea rustled with moonlight.
Swell shuts and opens
like a throat,
she claps
under my pedalo
impudently happy.
Where are you now
my sister, my spouse?
Clap with one hand
or clap to nothing –
I know you can.
Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth
my sister, my spouse.
The pedalo rocks
and is still again.