Blackberries after Michaelmas
These blackberries belong to the devil.
Don’t try to eat them now
or drop them in your pail.
Their flaccid sweetness
belongs to the one who ruined Adam,
set him to work in these hard fields
set him wallowing in green water
for pilchard and mackerel.
These blackberries are the devil’s
and have his spit on them –
look where it settles.
To my nine-year-old self
You must forgive me. Don’t look so surprised,
perplexed, and eager to be gone,
balancing on your hands or on the tightrope.
You would rather run than walk, rather climb than run
rather leap from a height than anything.
I have spoiled this body we once shared.
Look at the scars, and watch the way I move,
careful of a bad back or a bruised foot.
Do you remember how, three minutes after waking
we’d jump straight out of the ground floor window
into the summer morning?
That dream we had, no doubt it’s as fresh in your mind
as the white paper to write it on.
We made a start, but something else came up –
a baby vole, or a bag of sherbet lemons –
and besides, that summer of ambition
created an ice-lolly factory, a wasp trap
and a den by the cesspit.
I’d like to say that we could be friends
but the truth is we have nothing in common
beyond a few shared years. I won’t keep you then.
Time to pick rosehips for tuppence a pound,
time to hide down scared lanes
from men in cars after girl-children.
or to lunge out over the water
on a rope that swings from that tree
long buried in housing –
but no, I shan’t cloud your morning. God knows
I have fears enough for us both –
I leave you in an ecstasy of concentration
slowly peeling a ripe scab from your knee
to taste it on your tongue.
Fallen angel
Waist-deep in snow and wading
through the world’s cold,
this fallen angel with wings furled
on his way home from Bethlehem,
the story all told.
Centuries after the birth
through drab years with the promise fading
like gilt off the gold,
fallen angel still tramping the earth –
so long, the way back to Bethlehem
through the world’s cold.
Bridal
Bride in the mud of the yard,
bare feet skilled to find
the nub of hard ground.
She stands as if she were transparent,
ears spiked, fingers encircled,
skirts stitched with metal.
Mud squelches through the keyhole
between first and second toe,
she slips, rescues herself.
Silence of banknotes
from sweaty hands, pinned to her dress
so the president’s face shows.
She drives the cows in
through velvet of shit and slime,
their soiled tails switching
their dirty udders craving release
as women crave the gums of their babies
in the first shudder of feeding.
In the silence of the marriage night
with a befuddled bridegroom
too old for the task at hand
she will not cry out.
Bride in the mud of the yard,
thirteen and hopping
through velvet of cowshit
from stone to stone.
Still life with ironing
I love it when you look at me like this,
and the washed smell of your blue denim
We are washed out, the two of us,
shadows of what we have been.
A moth in the bowl of a paper lampshade,
a gust of night and a baby’s cry,
a drop of milk on the wrist, inside
where the blood beats time.
Sometimes a heatwave is too much to take.
We are not up to it, up for it,
bare enough, blank enough. We fake
pleasure but turn towards evening,
to the clink of a glass, the settling of blackbirds
the talkative hose in the next garden,
a shirt with the buttons undone
and shadows put in by the iron.
Spanish Irish
It is your impulse I remember,
the movement that made you your own,
the way you laughed when you were told
some daily but delightful thing,
and the way you could not be fooled.
When I saw that man who recalled you
I put out my hand to keep him
as if his Spanish Irish face
must lighten in recognition,
and I was on the point of speaking
the pleasure of your name.
Cowboys
They rode the ridge those five minutes
I was caught in traffic
watching nothing but rain
falling on slate,
they rode the beauty of angles,
they laddered oblivion
and saved their own lives eight times
as their boots spun,
they rode without harness
astride the ridge of the roof,
they chucked a rope around the chimney
before it galloped off,
they rode in a rain-sweat,
they might have fallen like snow,
they hollered across the prairie
until the roofs echoed.
Below Hungerford Bridge
Below Hungerford Bridge the river
oils its own surface like a seabird.
Tide fights with current, crowds
surge to a concert, the light thickens.
How unaccountable the dead are:
I think you rear from your photograph
with an expression of terror: I can’t move.
Will you let me out of here?
I think I see T.S. Eliot
wan in his green make-up
but slyly playful, a big cat
gone shabby with keeping.
The traffic halts. There’s nothing
but a few pile-driven wharves
and the river remembering
its old courses.
Ophelia
I dreamed my love became a boat
on the saltings in winter
after long treading the green water,
I dreamed my love flew to the bar
where the tide teemed with the river,
and bucked and fought there,
I dreamed that my love’s timber
was a bed for eelgrass
and marsh samphire,
I dreamed my love became a boat
on the saltings in winter
after long treading the green water,
and beneath his shroud of skin
was a rib chamber
for winds to whistle in.
Winter bonfire
My mind aches where I cannot touch it.
It has put a net over some words,
it is hiding a poem.
Who is that man tending flames in his garden,
and why does he heap armfuls of paper
on his winter bonfire?
If I write down anything
no matter how stealthily
the poem will know it.
One A.M.
Melancholy at one A.M. –
the poem ended
or else just quietly
>
lying under the table
gnawing the bone of its being –
the lighthouse in its bowl of sea
the town by its holy well
and the owls hunting.
Surf hollows the base of the cliffs,
owls hollow the safety of night
and the poem makes its rest
by turning and turning
like a hare in its form.
Lemon and stars
The stars come so close
they seem not to be shining
but to be remaking the world
in their own pattern
and we seem to be caught in their dust
like the fingerprints of creatures
not yet imagined.
Besides, there is the starlight
not enough to make star-shadow
but enough, in the absence of moon
to heap up darkness
just here, under the lemon tree.
Cutting open the lemons
After all they didn’t taste of salt
or the winter storms.
I had not expected the insides to be so
offhandedly daffodil –
lemons should be more malleable
to the imagination –
but like babies they are sure
that the planting and tending
gives no right over them.
Hearing owls
The dark fabric of night not torn
but seamed with the flight of owls
hunting the margin of the Downs.
The houses pull their roofs over them,
the sleepers plunge beneath their bedclothes
at the onrush of wings,
the mouse runs with its trail of urine.
The owl pulls off a miracle
as it homes in
like a jump-jet in mid-Atlantic
sighting its landing area
in a waste of sea slop.
The mouse is done. The owl swallows
while a car passes, knowing nothing
of the owl agape at its own fortune.
‘Often they go just before dawn’
A wash of stars covers the sky
before the day comes,
before the slippery quickness of brush-strokes
dries to a surface,
a wash of stars covers the sky
announcing with pallor
that they are going out
or that something else –
call it a day, or dawn –
is about to come in.
Quick, quick, get up the ladder
and paint in more brightness
for the stars to be dark against.
May voyage
A May evening and a bright moon
riding easily in its mystery,
you come out onto the balcony
and gaze there, relaxed, intent
as the horizon softens towards France
and the moon voyages, voyages.
What storms have you seen!
Such a hurricane
when wind hurled around the building
like an express train,
but you fought it out of your home
and now you note the turning of the tide
as the moon voyages, voyages
from peace into deeper peace
from old age into youth,
behind you the French windows are open
ahead of you only the shining
sea and the lovely work of the moon
as it voyages, voyages
into the calm.
About the Author
Helen Dunmore is 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 first prize in the National Poetry Competition in 2010. Her latest Bloodaxe poetry titles are Out of the Blue: Poems 1975–2001 (2001), Glad of These Times (2007), and The Malarkey (2012).
She has published eleven 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 a ghost story, The Greatcoat (2012), with Hammer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Copyright
Copyright © Helen Dunmore 2007
First published 2007 by
Bloodaxe Books Ltd,
Eastburn,
South Park,
Hexham,
Northumberland NE46 1BS.
This ebook edition first published in 2015.
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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 010 1 ebook