FROM
The Sea Skater
(1986)
For Francis, Ollie and Patrick
The bride’s nights in a strange village
At three in the morning
while mist limps between houses
while cloaks and blankets
dampen with dew
the bride sleeps with her husband
bundled in a red blanket,
her mouth parts and a bubble
of sour breathing goes free.
She humps wool up to her ears
while her husband tightens his arms
and rocks her, mumbling. Neither awakes.
In the second month of the marriage
the bride wakes after midnight.
Damp-bodied
she lunges from sleep
hair pricking with sweat
breath knocking her sides.
She eels from her husband’s grip
and crouches, listening.
The night is enlarged by sounds.
The rain has started.
It threshes leaves secretively
and there in the blackness
of whining dogs it finds out the house.
Its hiss enfolds her, blots up
her skin, then sifts off, whispering
in her like mirrors
the length of the rainy village.
Lazarus
Dumb, his lips swathed,
lips peaceful and dry
out of the swash and backwash of speech,
his face bound with a napkin,
his arms and his legs with gravecloths
in glistening daylight,
in dumbness, silky as flints
packed into chalk cliffs.
The age of the iron man
finished, the age of the stone
still blooming. Here are the avenues,
peaceful avenues with stone petals.
Here is a red-veined marble, and there
the white Carrara with black tracing
and all the messages, the pollen
on which passersby hang, bee-like,
words joined onto words.
Dumb, his lips sealed
with mouth-to-mouth breathing,
he abhors earth music:
the midday, dwindling
shadow of requiems.
A life-size statue of limestone,
scaly and worn over nostril
and lip-arches,
with yellow lichen and snails
poured into his eyes.
Liquid oboe pulsations
trail him, but dumbly
he pedals his stone body onward
past stab after word-covered slab
towards the expressionless sea he loves best,
to Bethsaida from Bethany.
Christmas roses
I remember years ago, that we had Christmas roses:
cold, greeny things under the snow –
fantastic hellebores, harbingers
of the century’s worst winter.
On little fields stitched over with drystone
we broke snow curds, our sledge
tossing us out at the wall.
For twelve years a plateau of sea
stopped at my parents’ window.
Here the slow Flatholm foghorn
sucking at the house fabric
recalls my little month-old brother,
kept in the house for weeks
while those snow days piled up like plates
to an impossible tower.
They were building the match factory
to serve moors seeded with conifers
that year of the Bay of Pigs,
the year of Cuba, when adults muttered
of taking to the moors with a shotgun
when the bomb dropped.
Such conversation, rapaciously
stored in a nine-year-old’s memory
breeds when I stare down Bridgwater Bay
to that glassy CEGB elegance, Hinkley
Point, treating the landscape like snow,
melting down marshes and long, lost
muddy horizons.
Fir thickets replace those cushions
of scratchy heather, and prick out the noise
of larks in the air, so constant
I never knew what it was.
Little hellebores with green veins,
not at all tender, and scentless
on frosty ground, with your own small
melt, your engine of growth:
that was the way I liked you.
I imagine you sent back from Africa
I imagine you sent back from Africa
leaving a patchwork of rust and khaki
sand silt in your tea and your blood.
The metal of tanks and cans
puckers your taste-buds.
Your tongue jumps from the touch
of charge left in a dying battery.
You spread your cards in the shade
of roving lorries whose canvas
tents twenty soldiers.
The greased cards patter
in chosen spaces.
I imagine you sent back from Africa
with a tin mug kept for the bullet hole
in at one angle and out another.
You mount the train at the port
asking if anywhere on earth
offers such grey, mild people.
Someone draws down the blind.
You see his buttons, his wrist,
his teeth filled to the roots.
He weakens the sunlight for you
and keeps watch on your face.
Your day sinks in a hollow of sleep
racket and megaphoned voices.
The troop-ship booms once. Laden
with new men she moves down the Sound
low in the water, egg-carrying.
But for you daylight
with your relieved breath
supping up train dirt.
A jolt is a rescue from sleep
and a glaze of filth from the arm-rest
patches your cheek. You try to catch voices
calling out stations closer to home.
The knight
In the dusk of a forest chapel
a knight lies bleeding.
The edges of his wound are rawly
exhausted by blood chafing
but still the blood gathers and wells.
At first he lay with his arms folded
waiting for his brother officers
his dog curled at his feet,
but soon the dog with a whimper
made off, tearing its fur,
and soon the knight, moaning,
tried to cuddle into a foetal position
but the terrible wound prevented him.
His armour has become a bandage
as stiff as the casing of a chrysalis.
His face no longer has the strength for amazement.
The knight cries for his mother
in the dark of a forest chapel.
He wants the smell of her
and of all living things
which are not bleeding.
The scent and hissing of pine needles
make him believe he’s in a hospital
where nurses pass by him.
He is afraid of falling
and of the stone floor under him.
In the dusk of a forest chapel
a knight lies bleeding.
In search of comfort
he turns to the warmer
grain of the wooden
bench he lies on
and licks its salty
whorls with his tongue.
In memoriam Cyril Smith 1913-1945
I’ve approached him since childhood,
since he was old, blurred,
my stake in the playground chants
and war games,
a word like ‘brother’
mixed
with a death story.
Wearing shorts and a smile
he stayed in the photograph box.
His hair was receding early.
He had Grandpa’s long lip and my mother’s love.
The jungle obliterates a city
of cries and murmurs,
bloody discharges
and unsent telegrams.
Now he is immanent
breaking off thoughts
printing that roll of film
one sweaty evening,
Four decades
have raised a thicket of deaths around him
a fence of thorn and a fence of roses.
His mother, my grandmother,
his father, his brother,
his camp companions
his one postcard.
The circle closes
in skin, limbs
and new resemblances.
We wanted to bring him
through life with us
but he grows younger.
We’ve passed him
holding out arms.
The parachute packers
The parachute packers with white faces
swathed over with sleep
and the stale bodily smell of sheets
make haste to tin huts where a twelve-hour
shift starts in ten minutes.
Their bare legs pump bicycle pedals,
they clatter on wooden-soled sandals
into the dazzling light over the work benches.
They rub in today’s issue of hand-cream.
Their fingers skim on the silk
as the unwieldy billows of parachute flatten
like sea-waves, oiled, folded in sevens.
The only silk to be had
comes in a military packaging:
dull-green, printed, discreet,
gone into fashioning parachutes
to be wondered at like the flowers’
down-spinning, seed-bearing canopies
lodged in the silt of village memory.
A girl pulling swedes in a field
senses the shadow of parachutes
and gapes up, knees braced
and hair tangling. She must be riddled,
her warm juices all spilled
for looking upwards too early
into the dawn, leafy with parachutes.
Heavenly wide canopies
bring down stolid chaps with their rifle butts
ready to crack, with papers
to govern the upturned land,
with boots, barbed wire and lists on fine paper
thousands of names long.
I look up now at two seagulls,
at cloud drifts and a lamp-post
bent like a feeding swan,
and at the sound of needles
seaming up parachutes in Nissen huts
with a hiss and pull through the stuff
of these celestial ball-dresses
for nuns, agents, snow-on-the-boots men
sewn into a flower’s corolla
to the music of Workers’ Playtime.
At dusk the parachute packers
release their hair from its nets
and ride down lanes whitened by cow-parsley
to village halls, where the dances
and beer and the first cigarettes
expunge the clouds of parachute silk
and rules touching their hair and flesh.
In the bar they’re the girls who pack parachutes
for our boys. They can forget
the coughs of the guard on duty,
the boredom and long hours
and half-heard cries of caught parachutists.
Porpoise washed up on the beach
After midday the great lazy
slaps of the sea,
the whistling of a boy who likes the empty
hour while the beach is feeding,
the cliffs vacant, gulls untidily drowsing
far out on the water.
I walked on in the dazzle
round to the next cove
where the sea was running backwards like mercury
from people busy at cutting
windows in the side of a beached porpoise.
The creature had died recently.
Naturally its blood was mammalian,
its skin supple and tough; it made me
instantly think of uses for it –
shoe soling, sealing the hulls of boats –
something to explain the intent knives
But there was no mussel harvest on the rocks
or boat blinding through noon
out to the crab pots,
not here but elsewhere the settled
stupor of digestion went on.
The porpoise had brought the boys between fourteen and eighteen,
lengthened their lives by a burning
profitless noon-time,
so they cut windows out of surprise
or idleness, finding the thing here
like a blank wall, inviting them.
They jumped from its body, prodded it,
looked in its mouth and its eyes,
hauled up its tail like a child’s drawing
and became serious.
Each had the use of the knife in turn
and paused over the usual graffiti
to test words first with a knife-point
and fit the grey boulder of flesh under them.
Clapping their wings the gulls came back from the sea,
the pink screens of the hotel opened,
the last boy scoured the knife with sand.
I walked back along the shingle
breathing away the bloody trail of the porpoise
and saw the boys’ wet heads glittering,
their hooting, diving
bodies sweeping them out of the bay.
In deep water
For three years I’ve been wary of deep water.
I busied myself on the shore
towelling, handing out underwear
wading the baby knee-high.
I didn’t think I had forgotten
how to play in the deep water,
but it was only today I went there
passing the paddle boats and bathers,
the parallel harbour wall,
until there was no one at all but me
rolling through the cold water
and scarcely bothering to swim
from pure buoyancy.
Of course I could still see them:
the red and the orange armbands,
the man smiling and pointing seawards,
the tender faces.
It’s these faces that have taken me
out of the deep water
and made my face clench like my mother’s
once, as I pranced on a ten-foot
wall over a glass-house.
The water remembers my body,
stretched and paler as it is.
Down there is my old reflection
spread-eagled, steadily moving.
Lady Macduff and the primroses
Now the snowdrop, the wood-anemone, the crocus
have flowered
and faded back to dry, scarcely-seen threads,
Lady Macduff goes down to the meadow
where primrose flowers are thickening.
Her maid told her this morning, It’s time
to pick them now, there will never be more
without some dying.
Even the kitchen girls, spared for an hour,
come to pick flowers for wine.
The children’s nurse has never seemed to grasp
that she only need lay down the flowers loosely,
the flat-bottomed baskets soon fill
with yellow, chill primroses covered by sturdy leaves,
but the nurse will weave posies
even though the children are impati
ent
and only care who is first, has most
of their mother’s quick smile.
Pasties have been brought from the castle.
Savoury juices spill from their ornate crusts,
white cloths are smeared with venison gravy
and all eat hungrily
out in the spring wind.
Lady Macduff looks round at the sparkling
sharpness of grass, whipped kerchiefs and castle battlements
edged with green light
and the primroses like a fall
colder than rain, warmer than snow,
petals quite still, hairy stems helplessly curling.
She thinks how they will be drunk
as yellow wine, swallow by swallow
filling the pauses of mid-winter,
sweet to raw throats.
Mary Shelley
No living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgement upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY