each day – the fabric stiffening –
towels bodiless and sex over.
I load the brush with paint again
and I hear myself breathing.
Sun slips off the wall
so the yard is cool
and lumbered with shadows,
and then a cannonade of apples
punches the wall and my arms,
the ripe stripes on their cheeks fall open,
flesh spurts and the juices fizz and glisten.
Pictures of a Chinese nursery
Yesterday my stepson came home with school photographs.
The image is altered:
no longer one child
rimmed with a photographer’s background
smiling much as he does at home
but three or four placed at a table together
working at egg-boxes, tissue-paper
and friendship enough to shiver their absorbed faces.
‘That’s Jessica. Sometimes, she gives all of us a kiss.’
Others are pointed out for pissing in school flowerbeds.
On his wall I have stuck a poster of a Chinese nursery.
There is a river, a tree,
a wooden bridge, and far into the distance
thick-packed orchards fruiting and flowering.
On the verandah the children fall into place
as radiant parents stride to the field,
the nursery curls on itself
the day without clocks unfolds
and after dinner their songs fly onto the mountain
as far as the plum orchards where workers stop to eat rice.
Pharaoh’s daughter
The slowly moving river in summer
where bulrushes, mallow and water forget-me-not
slip to their still faces.
A child’s body
joins their reflections,
his plastic boat
drifts into midstream
and though I lean down to
brown water that smells of peppermint
I can’t get at it:
my willow branch flails and pushes the boat outwards.
He smiles quickly
and tells me it doesn’t matter;
my feet grip in the mud
and mash blue flowers under them.
Then we go home
masking with summer days the misery
that has haunted a whole summer.
I think once of the Egyptian woman
who drew a baby from the bulrushes
hearing it mew in the damp
odrorous growth holding its cradle.
There’s nothing here but the boat
caught by its string
and through this shimmering day I struggle
drawn down by the webbed
years, the child’s life cradled within.
Domestic poem
So, how decisive a house is:
quilted, a net of blood and green
droops on repeated actions at nightfall.
A bath run through the wall
comforts the older boy sleeping
meshed in the odours of breath and Calpol
while in the maternity hospital
ancillaries rinse out the blood bottles;
the feel and the spore
of babies’ sleep stays here.
Later, some flat-packed plastic
swells to a parachute of oxygen
holding the sick through their downspin,
now I am well enough, I
iron, and place the folded sheets in bags
from which I shall take them, identical,
after the birth of my child.
And now the house closes us,
close on us,
like fruit we rest in its warm branches
and though it’s time for the child to come
nobody knows it, the night passes
while I sleepwalk the summer heat.
Months shunt me and I bring you
like an old engine hauling the blue
spaces that flash between track and train time.
Mist rises, smelling of petrol’s
burnt offerings, new born,
oily and huge, the lorries drum
on Stokes’ Croft,
is blue and pale as a Chinese mountain.
and I breathe in.
It’s time to go now. I take nothing
but breath, thinned.
A blown-out dandelion globe
might choose my laundered body to grow in.
Patrick I
Patrick, I cannot write
such poems for you as a father might
coming upon your smile,
your mouth half sucking, half sleeping,
your tears shaken from your eyes like sparklers
break up the nightless weeks of your life:
lighthearted, I go to the kitchen
and cook breakfast, aching as you grow hungry.
Mornings are plain as the pages
of books in sedentary schooldays.
If I were eighty and lived next door
hanging my pale chemises on the porch
would I envy or pity my neighbour?
Polished and still as driftwood
she stands smoothing her dahlias;
liquid, leaking,
I cup the baby’s head to my shoulder:
the child’s a boy and will not share
one day these obstinate, exhausted mornings.
Patrick II
The other babies were more bitter than you
Patrick, with your rare, tentative cry,
your hours of steep, snuffing the medical air.
Give me time for your contours, your fierce drinking.
Like land that has been parched for half a summer
and smiles, sticky with feeding
I have examined and examined you
at midnight, at two days; I have accompanied you
to the blue world on another floor of the hospital
where half-formed babies open their legs like anemones
and nurses, specialised as astronauts,
operate around the apnoea pillows.
But here you bloomed. You survived,
sticky with nectar. X-rayed, clarified,
you came back, dirty and peaceful.
And now like sunflowers settling their petals
for the last strokes of light in September
your eyes turn to me at 3 A.M.
You meet my stiff, mucousy face
and snort, beating your hand on my breast
as one more feed flows through the darkness, timed
to nothing now but the pull of your mouth.
Weaning
Cool as sleep, the crates ring.
Birds stir and my milk stings me;
you slip my grasp. I never find you
in dreams – only your mouth
not crying
your sleep still pressing on mine.
The carpets shush. The house back silences.
I turn with you, wide-lipped
blue figure
into the underground of babies
and damp mothers fumbling at bras
and the first callus grows on us
weaned from your night smiles.
Clinic day
The midwife whose omniscient hands
drew blood as I draw money out on Tuesdays
calls me to wait. We stand
half off the pavement, she spinning a bicycle pedal,
I rocking a pram.
She will be homeless she says by Friday.
But I can’t help her. I want to respond to
her troubles with the sleeping flesh of the baby.
Useless. Her days of him are over.
Here at the clinic they know we are mothers.
I might avert all eyes from the baby,
tie a blue bead to hi
s wrist,
not name him –
yet here they brazenly call him my son,
brandish his name on paper,
tell me how well he gets on.
Breathlessly evil fate stays
by their red door-posts on tiptoe:
they will not play.
Approaches to winter
Now I write off a winter of growth.
First, hands batting the air,
forehead still smeared,
– now, suddenly, he stands there
upright and rounded as a tulip.
The garden sparkles through the windows.
Dark and a heap in my arms;
the thermostat clicking all night.
Out in the road beached cars and winter
so cold five minutes would finish you.
Light fell in its pools
each evening. Tranquilly
it stamped the same circles.
Friends shifted their boots on the step.
Their faces gleamed from their scarves
that the withdrawal of day
brought safety.
Experience so stitched, intimate,
mutes me.
Now I’m desperate for solitude.
The house enrages me.
I go miles, pushing the pram,
thinking about Christina Rossetti’s
black dresses – my own absent poems.
I go miles, touching his blankets proudly,
drawing the quilt to his lips.
I write of winter and the approaches to winter.
Air clings to me, rotten Lord Derbies,
patched in their skins, thud down.
The petals of Michaelmas daisies give light.
Now I’m that glimpsed figure for children
occupying doorways and windows;
that breath of succulence
ignored till nightfall.
I go out before the curtains are drawn
and walk close to the windows
which shine secretly.
Bare to the street
red pleats of a lampshade expose
bodies in classic postures, arguing.
Their senseless jokes explode with saliva.
I mop and tousle.
It’s three o’clock in the cul-de-sac.
Out of the reach of traffic,
free from the ply
of bodies glancing and crossing,
the shopping, visiting,
cashing orders at the post office,
I lie on my bed in the sun
drawing down streams of babble.
This room holds me, a dull
round bulb stubbornly
rising year after year in the same place.
The night chemist
In the chemist’s at night-time
swathed counters and lights turned down
lean and surround us.
Waiting for our prescriptions
we clock these sounds:
a baby’s peaked hush,
hawked breath.
I pay a pound
and pills fall in my curled palms.
Holding their white packages tenderly
patients track back to the pain.
‘Why is the man shouting?’ Oliver asks me.
I answer, ‘He wants to go home.’
Softly, muffled by cloth
the words still come
and the red-streaked drunkard goes past us,
rage scalding us.
I would not dare bring happiness
into the chemist’s at night-time.
Its gift-wrapped lack of assistance still presses
as suffering closes the blinded windows.
St Paul’s
This evening clouds darken the street quickly,
more and more grey
flows throngh the yellowing treetops,
traffic flies downhill
roaring and spangled with faces,
full buses
rock past the Sussex Place roundabout.
In Sussex the line of Downs
has no trees to uncover,
no lick of the town’s wealth, blue
in smoke, no gold, fugitive dropping.
In villages old England
checks rainfall, sick of itself.
Here there are scraps and flashes:
bellying food smells – last-minute buying –
plantain, quarters of ham.
The bread shop lady pulls down
loaves that will make tomorrow’s cheap line.
On offer are toothpaste and shoe soles
mended same day for Monday’s interview
and a precise network of choices
for old women collecting their pension
on Thursday, already owing the rent man.
Some places are boarded. You lose your expectancy –
soon it appears you never get home. Still
it’s fine on evenings and in October
to settle here. Still the lights splashing look beautiful.
Poem for December 28
My nephews with almond faces
black hair like bunces of grapes
(the skin stroked and then bruised
the head buried and caressed)
he takes his son’s head in his hands
kisses it blesses it leaves it:
the boy with circles under his eyes like damsons
not the blond baby, the stepson.
In the forest stories about the black
father the jew the incubus
if there are more curses they fall on us.
Behind the swinging ropes of their isolation
my nephews wait, sucking their sweets.
The hall fills quickly and neatly.
If they keep still as water
I’ll know them.
I look but I can’t be certain:
my nephews with heavy eyelids
blowing in the last touches of daylight
my sisters raising them up like torches.
Greenham Common
Today is barred with darkness of winter.
In cold tents women protest,
for once unveiled, eyes stinging with smoke.
They stamp round fires in quilted anoraks,
glamourless, they laugh often
and teach themselves to speak eloquently.
Mud and the camp’s raw bones
set them before the television camera.
Absent, the women of old photographs
holding the last of their four children,
eyes darkened, hair covered,
bodies waxy as cyclamen;
absent, all these suffering ones.
New voices rip at the throat,
new costumes, metamorphoses.
Soft-skirted, evasive
women were drawn from the ruins,
swirls of ash on them like veils.
History came as a seducer
and said: this is the beauty of women
in bombfall. Dolorous
you curl your skirts over your sleeping children.
Instead they stay at this place
all winter; eat from packets and jars,
keep sensible, don’t hunger,
battle each day at the wires.
Poem for hidden women
‘Fuck this staring paper and table –
I’ve just about had enough of it.
I’m going out for some air,’
he says, letting the wind bang up his sheets of poems.
He walks quickly; it’s cool,
and rainy sky covers both stars and moon.
Out of the windows come slight
echoes of conversations receding upstairs.
There. He slows down.
A dark side-street – thick bushes –
he doesn’t see them.
He smokes. Leaves can stir as they please.
(We clack like jackrabbits from pool to pool of lamplight.
Stretching our lips, we walk exposed
as milk cattle past heaps of rubbish
killed by the edge
of knowledge that trees hide
a face slowly detaching itself
from shadow, and starting to smile.)
The poet goes into the steep alleys
close to the sea, where fish scales line the gutter
and women prostitute themselves to men
as men have described in many poems.
They’ve said how milky, or bitter
as lemons they find her –
the smell of her hair
…vanilla…cinnamon…
there’s a smell for every complexion.
Cavafy tells us he went always
to secret rooms and purer vices;
he wished to dissociate himself
from the hasty unlacings of citizens
fumbling, capsizing –