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 impatient
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
In the weightlessness of time and our passage within it
voices and rooms swim.
Cleft after soft cleft
parts, word-covered lips
thin as they speak.
I should recall how pink and tender
your lids looked when you read too long
while I produced seamed
patchwork, my own phantom.
Am I the jury, the evidence,
the recollection?
Last night I dreamed of a prospect
and so I dreamed backwards:
first I woke in the dark
scraping my knuckles on board and mould.
I remember half listening
or reading in the shadow of a fire;
each evening I would lie quietly
breathing the scent of my flesh till I slept.
I loved myself in my new dress.
I loved the coral stems rising from the rosebush
under my window in March.
I was intact, neat,
dressing myself each morning.
I dreamed my little baby was alive,
mewing for me from somewhere in the room.
I chafed her feet and tucked her nightdress close.
Claire, Shelley and I left England.
We crossed the Channel and boasted afterwards
We went by grey houses, shutters still closed,
people warmly asleep. My eyes were dazed
wide open in abatement and vacancy.
*
A bad wife is like winter in the house.
(diary of Claire Clairmont, Florence 1820)
In Florence in winter grit scoured between houses;
the plaster needed replacing, the children had coughs.
I lived in a nursery which smelled of boredom and liniment.
In bed I used to dream of water crossings
by night. I looked fixedly forward.
It was the first winter I became ugly:
I was unloving all winter,
frozen by my own omens.
In Lerici I watched small boats on the bay
trace their insect trails on the flat water.
Orange lamps and orange blossom
lit and suffused the night garden.
Canvas slashed in a squall.
Stifling tangles of sail and fragile
masts snapping brought the boat over.
The blackened sea
kept its waves still, then tilting
knocked you into its cold crevices.
I was pressed to a pinpoint,
my breath flat.
Scarcely pulsating
I gave out nothing.
I gave out nothing before your death.
We would pass in the house with blind-lipped
anger in me.
You put me aside for the winter.
I would soften like a season
I would moisten and turn to you.
I would not conform my arms to the shapes of dead children.
I patched my babies and fed them
but death got at them.
Your eyes fed everywhere.
I wonder at bodies once clustered,
at delicate tissue
emerging unable to ripen.
Each time I returned to life
calmer than the blood which left me
weightless as the ticking of a blind-cord.
Inside my amply-filled dress
I am renewed seamlessly.
Fledged in my widow’s weeds
I was made over, for this
prickle of live flesh
wedged in its own corpulence.
The plum tree
The plum was my parents’ tree,
above them
as I was at my bedroom window
wondering why they chose to walk this way quietly
under the plum tree.
My sisters and I stopped playing
as they reached up and felt for the fruit.
It lay among bunches of leaves,
oval and oozing resin
out into pearls of gum.
They bit into the plums
without once glancing
back at the house.
Some years were thin:
white mildew streaking the trunk,
fruit buckled and green,
but one April
the tree broke from its temperate blossoming
and by late summer the branches
trailed earth, heavy with pound
after pound of bursting Victorias,
and I remember the oblivious steps
my parents took as they went quietly
out of the house one summer
evening
to stand under the plum tree.
The air-blue gown
Tonight I’m eating the past
consuming its traces,
the past is a heap
sparkling with razor blades
where patches of sweetness
deepen to compost,
woodlice fold up their legs
and roll luxuriously,
cold vegetation
rises to blood heat.
The local sea’s bare
running up to the house
tufting its waves
with red seaweed
spread against a Hebridean noon.
Lightly as sandpipers marking the shoreline
boats at the jetty sprang
and rocked upon the green water.
Not much time passes, but suddenly
now when you’re crumpled after a cold
I see how the scale and changes
of few words measure us.
At this time of year I remember a cuckoo’s
erratic notes on a mild morning.
It lay full-fed on a cherry branch
repeating an hour of sweetness
its grey body unstirring
its lustrous eyes turning.
Talk sticks and patches
walls and the kitchen formica
while at the table outlines
seated on a thousand evenings
drain like light going out of a landscape.
The back door closes, swings shut,
drives me to place myself inside it.
In this flickering encampment
fire pours sideways
then once more stands
evenly burning.
I wake with a touch on my face
and turn sideways
butting my head into darkness.
The wind’s banging diminishes. An aircraft
wanders through the upper atmosphere
bee-like, propelled by loneliness.
It searches for a fallen corolla,
its note rising and going
as it crosses the four quarters.
The city turns a seamed cheek upward,
confides itself to the sound and hazardous
construction of a journey by starlight.
I drop back soundlessly,
my lips slackened.
Headache alone is my navigator,
plummeting, shedding its petals.
It’s Christmas Eve.
Against my nightdress a child’s foot, burning,
passes its fever through the cotton,
the tide of bells swings
and the child winces.
The bells are shamelessly
clanging, the voices
hollering churchward.
I’m eating the past tonight
tasting gardenia perfume
licking the child-like socket of an acorn
before each is consumed.
It was not Hardy who stayed there
searching for the air-blue gown.
It was the woman who once more, secretly,
tried the dress on.
My sad descendants
O wintry ones, my sad descendants,
with snowdrops in your hands you join me
to celebrate these dark, short
days lacking a thread of sun.
Three is a virtuous number,
each time one fewer to love,
the number of fairy tales,
wishes, labours for love.
My sad descendants
who had no place in the sun,
hope brought you to mid-winter,
never to spring
or to the lazy benches of summer
and old bones.
My sad descendants
whose bones are a network of frost,
I carry your burn and your pallor,
your substance dwindled to drops.
I breathe you another pattern
since no breath warmed you from mine,
on the cold of the night window
I breathe you another pattern,
I make you outlive rosiness
and envied heartbeats.
Patrick at four years old on Bonfire Night
Cursing softly and letting the matches drop
too close to the firework box,
we light an oblation
to rough-scented autumnal gods,
shaggy as chrysanthemums;
and you, in your pearly maroon
waterproof suit, with your round
baby brows, stare upward and name
chrysanthemum fountain and silver fountain
and Catherine wheel: saints’ names
like yours, Patrick, and you record them.
This morning, climbing up on my pillow,
you list saints’ names guessed at from school.
They go off, one by one on the ritual plank:
jack-in-a-box, high-jump and Roman candle,
searching the currant bushes with gunpowder.
We stand in savoury fumes like pillars,
our coats dark, our slow-burning fuse lit,
and make our little bonfire with spits
for foil-wrapped potatoes and hot-dogs –
by your bedtime
the rough-scented autumnal gods
fuse with the saints and jack-lanterns.
The horse landscape
Today in a horse landscape
horses steam in the lee of thorn hedges
on soaking fields. Horses waltz
on iron poles in dank fairgrounds.
A girl in jodhpurs on Sand Bay
leads her pony over and over
jumps made of driftwood and traffic cones,
A TV blares the gabble of photofinishes.
The bookie’s plastic curtain releases
punters onto the hot street
littered with King Cone papers.
In a landscape with clouds and chalk downs
and cream houses, a horse rigid as bone
glares up at kites and hang-gliders.
One eye’s cut from the flowered turf:
a horse skull, whispering secrets
with wind-sighs like tapping on phone wires.
The group leader in beautiful boots
always on horse-back,
the mounted lady squinnying
down at the hunt intruders,
draw blood for their own horse landscape
and scorn horse-trading, letting the beasts mate
on scrubby fields, amongst catkins
and watery ditches.
Here’s a rearing bronze horse
welded to man, letting his hands
stay free for banner and weapon –
mild shadow of Pushkin’s nightmare.
Trained police horses sway on great hooves.
Riders avoid our faces, and gaze
down on our skull crowns
where the bone jigsaw cleaves.
Grooms whistle and urge
the sweaty beasts to endure battle.
We’re always the poor infantry
backing off Mars field,
out of frame for the heroic riders
preserved in their horse landscape.
Thetis
Thetis, mother of all mothers
who fear the death of their children,
held down her baby Achilles
in the dark Styx
whose waters flow fast
without ripples or wave-break,
bearing little boats of paper
with matchstick masts,
returning not even a sigh
or drenched fibre to life.
Thetis, mother of all mothers
destined to outlive their children,
took Achilles by the heel
and thrust him into the Styx
so that sealed, immortal, dark-eyed,
he’d return to his white cradle
and to his willow rattle.
She might have held him less tightly
and for a while given him
wholly to the trustworthy river
which has no eddies or backwaters
and always carries its burdens onward,
she might have left him to play
on the soft grass of the river-edge.
But through the pressure-marks of her white fingers
the baby found his way forward
towards the wound he knew best.
Even while the arrow was in the wood
and the bow gleaming with leaves
the current of the Styx
faintly suckled and started
in the little flexed ankles
pressed against Thetis’ damp breasts.
In the tents
Our day off, agreed by the wind
and miry fields and unburied dead,
in the tent with first light filtering
a rosy dawn which masks rain.
The rosiness rests on our damp flesh,
on armour stacked by the tent walls,
on our captain and his lolling companion.
I go down to the sea shore
to find white pebbles for games.
I look for the island, kidding myself