Out of the Blue by Helen Dunmore Read Free Book Online Page B

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
    and people swiftly looking at me.
    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