Out of the Blue by Helen Dunmore Read Free Book Online

boy’s voice, blurred,
    passed through my cot bars, stealing my baby magic.
    You were the one they smiled at.’

Ollie and Charles at St Andrew’s Park
    Up at the park once more
    the afternoon ends.
    My sister and I huddle in quilted jackets.
    A cigarette burn
    crinkles the pushchair waterproofs,
    the baby relaxes
    sucking his hood’s curled edges.
    Still out of breath
    from shoving and easing the wheels
    on broken pavement we stay here.
    Daffodils break in the wintry bushes
    and Ollie and Charles in drab parkas
    run, letting us wait by the swings.
    Under eskimo hoods their hair springs
    dun coloured, child-smelling.
    They squat, and we speak quietly,
    occasionally scanning the indigo patched
    shadows with children melted against them.

Winter fairs
    The winter fairs are all over.
    The smells of coffee and naphtha
    thin and are quite gone.
    An orange tossed in the air
    hung like a wonder
    everyone would catch once,
    the children’s excitable cheeks
    and woollen caps that they wore
    tight, up to the ears,
    are all quietened, disbudded;
    now am I walking the streets
    noting a bit of gold paper? –
    a curl of peeI suggesting the whole
    aromatic globe in the air.

In a wood near Turku
    The summer cabins are padlocked.
    Their smell of sandshoes
    evaporates over the lake water
    leaving pine walls to shoulder the ice.
    Resin seals them in hard splashes.
    The woodman
    knocks at their sapless branches.
    He gets sweet puffballs
    and chanterelles in his jacket,
    strips off fungus like yellow leather,
    thumbs it, then hacks the tree trunk.
    Hazy and cold as summer dawn
    the day goes on,
    wood rustles on wood,
    close, as the mist thins
    like smoke around the top of the pine trees
    and once more the saw whines.

Landscape from the Monet Exhibition at Cardiff
    My train halts in the snowfilled station.
    Gauges tick and then cease
    on ice as the track settles
    and iron-bound rolling stock creaks.
    Two work-people
    walk up alongside us,
    wool-wadded, shifting their picks,
    the sun, small as a rose,
    buds there in the distance.
    The gangs throw handfuls of salt like sowers
    and light fires to keep the points moving.
    Here are trees, made with two strokes.
    A lady with a tray of white teacups
    walks lifting steam from window to window.
    I’d like to pull down the sash and stay
    here in the blue where it’s still work time.
    The hills smell cold and are far away
    at standstill, where lamps bloom.

Breakfast
    Often when the bread tin is empty
    and there’s no more money for the fire
    I think of you, and the breakfast you laid for me
    – black bread and honey and beer.
    I threw out a panful of wine yesterday –
    the aluminium had turned sour –
    I have two colours of bread to choose from,
    I’d take the white if I were poor,
    so indigence is distant as my hands
    stiff in unheated washing water,
    but you, with your generous gift of butter
    and cheese with poppy seeds, all in one morning meal
    have drawn the blinds up at the bedside window
    and I can watch the ships’ tall masts appear.

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.

Christmas roses
    I remember years ago, that we had Christmas