Out of the Blue by Helen Dunmore Page 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