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.
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;
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 –
white
flesh in a mound and kept from sight,
but he doesn’t tell us
whether these boys’ hair always smelled of cinnamon
or if their nights cost more than spices.
A woman goes into the night café,
chooses a clean
knife and a spoon
and takes up her tray.
Quickly the manageress leans from the counter.
(As when a policeman arrests a friend
her eyes plunge and her voice roughens.)
She points to a notice with her red nail:
‘After 11 we serve only accompanied females.’
The woman fumbles her grip
on her bag, and it slips.
Her forces tumble.
People look on as she scrabbles
for money and tampax.
A thousand shadows accompany her
down the stiff lino, through the street lighting.
The poet sits in a harbour bar
where the tables are smooth and solid to lean on.
It’s peaceful. Men gaze
for hours at beer and brass glistening.
The sea laps. The door swings.
The poet feels poems
invade him. All day he has been stone-breaking
he says. He would be happier in cafés
in other countries, drinking, watching;
he feels he’s a familiar sort of poet
but he’s at ease with it.
Besides, he’s not actually writing a poem:
there’s plenty, he’s sure,
in drink and hearing the sea move.
For what is Emily Dickinson doing
back at the house – the home?
A doctor emerges, wiping his face,
and pins a notice on the porch.
After a while you don’t even ask.
No history
gets at this picture:
a woman named Sappho
sat in bars by purple water
with her feet crossed at the ankles
and her hair flaming with violets
never smiling when she didn’t feel like it.
‘End here, it’s hopeful,’
says the poet, getting up from the table.
If no revolution come
If no revolution come
star clusters
will brush heavy on the sky
and grapes burst
into the mouths of fifteen
well-fed men,
these honest men
will build them houses like pork palaces
if no revolution come,
short-life dust children
will be crumbling in the sun –
they have to score like this
if no revolution come.
The sadness of people
don’t look at it too long:
you’re studying for madness
if no revolution come.
If no revolution come
it will be born sleeping,
it will be heavy as baby
playing on mama’s bones,
it will be gun-thumping on Sunday
and easy good time
for men who make money,
for men who make money
grow like a roof
so the rubbish of people
can’t live underneath.
If no revolution come
star clusters
will drop heavy from the sky
and blood burst
out of the mouths of fifteen
washing women,
and the land-owners will drink us
one body by one:
they have to score like this
if no revolution come.
A safe light
I hung up the sheets in moonlight,
surprised that it really was so
steady, a quickly moving pencil
flowing onto the stained cotton.
How the valves
in that map
of taut fabric
blew in and blew out
then spread flat
over the tiles
while the moon filled them with light.
A hundred feet above the town
for once the moonscape showed nothing extraordinary
only the clicking pegs
and radio news from our
kitchen.
One moth hesitated
tapping at our lighted window
and in the same way the moonlight
covered the streets, all night.
Near Dawlish
Her fast asleep face turns from me,
the oil on her eyelids gleams
and the shadow of a removed moustache
darkens the curve of her mouth,
her lips are still flattened together
and years occupy her face,
her holiday embroidery glistens,
her fingers quiver then rest.
I perch in my pink dress
sleepiness fanning my cheeks,
not lurching, not touching
as the train leaps.
Mother you should not be sleeping.
Look how dirty my face is, and lick
the smuts off me with your salt spit.
Golden corn rocks to the window
as the train jerks. Your narrowing body leaves me
frightened, too frightened to cry for you.
The last day of the exhausted month
The last day of the exhausted month