Free Out of the Blue by Helen Dunmore

sweat-dark, shuddering horses
    down to the walk.

A mortgage on a pear tree
    A pear tree stands in its own maze.
    It does not close its blossom all night
    but holds out branchfuls of cool
    wide-open flowers. Its slim leaves look black
    and stir like tongues in the lamp-light.
    It was here before the houses were built.
    The owner grew wasteland and waited for values to rise.
    The builders swerved a boundary sideways
    to cup the tree in a garden. When they piled rubble
    it was a soft cairn mounting the bole.
    The first owner of the raw garden
    came out and walked on the clay clods.
    There was the pear tree, bent down
    with small blunt fruits, each wide where the flower was,
    shaped like a medlar, but sweet.
    The ground was dense with fermenting pears,
    half trodden to pulp, half eaten.
    She could not walk without slipping.
    Slowly she walked in her own maze,
    sleepy, feeling the blood seep
    down her cold fingers, down the spread branch
    of veins which trails to the heart,
    and remembered how she’d stood under a tree
    holding out arms, with two school-friends.
    It was the fainting-game,
    played in the dinner-hour from pure boredom,
    never recalled since. For years this was growing
    to meet her, and now she’s signed for her own
    long mortgage over the pear tree
    and is the gainer of its accrued beauty,
    but when she goes into her bedroom
    and draws her curtains against a spring night
    the pear tree does not close its white blossom.
    The flowers stay open with slim leaves flickering around them:
    touched and used, they bear fruit.

A pæony truss on Sussex Place
    Restless, the pæony truss tosses about
    in a destructive spring wind.
    Already its inner petals are white
    without one moment of sun-warmed expansion.
    The whole bunch of the thing looks poor
    as a stout bare-legged woman in November
    slopping her mules over the post office step
    to cash a slip of her order book.
    The wind rips round the announced site
    for inner city conversion: this is the last tough
    bit of the garden, with one lilac
    half sheared-off and half blooming.
    The AIDS ad is defaced and the Australian
    lager-bright billboard smirks down
    on wind-shrivelled passersby who stayed put
    to vote in the third Thatcher election.
    The porch of the Elim Pentecostal Church brightens
    as a woman in crimson and white suit
    steps out, pins her hat down
    then grasps the hands of her wind-tugged grandchildren.

Permafrost
    For all frozen things –
    my middle finger that whitens
    from its old, ten-minute frostbite,
    for black, slimy potatoes
    left in the clamp,
    for darkness and cold like cloths
    over the cage,
    for permafrost, lichen crusts
    nuzzled by reindeer,
    the tender balance of decades
    null as a vault.
     
    For all frozen things –
    the princess and princes
    staring out of their bunker
    at the original wind,
    for NATO survivors in nuclear moonsuits
    whirled from continent to continent
    like Okies in bumpy Fords
    fleeing the dustbowl.
     
    For all frozen things –
    snowdrops and Christmas roses
    blasted down to the germ
    of their genetic zip-code.
    They fly by memory –
    cargo of endless winter,
    clods of celeriac, chipped
    turnips, lanterns at ten a.m.
    in the gloom of a Finnish market lace;
    flowers under glass, herring,
    little wizened apples.

     
    For all frozen things –
    the nipped fish in a mess of ice,
    the uncovered galleon
    tossed from four centuries of memory,
    or nuclear snowsuits bouncing on dust,
    trapped on the rough ride of the earth’s surface,
    on the rough swing of its axis,
    like moon-men lost on the moon
    watching the earth’s green flush
    tremble and perish.

At Cabourg
    Later my stepson will uncover a five-inch live shell
    from a silted pool on the beach at St Côme. It is complete
    with brass cap and a date on it: nineteen forty-three.
    We’ll look it up in the dictionary, take it
    to show at the Musée de la Libération
    – ce petit obus – but once they unwrap it
    they’ll drop the polite questions and scramble
    full tilt