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
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
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 she
ets
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