Free Out of the Blue by Helen Dunmore Page A

for the Gendarmerie opposite.
    The gendarmes will peer through its cradle of polythene
    gingerly, laughing. One’s at the phone
    already – he gestures – ‘Imagine! Let’s tell them
    we’ve got a live shell here in the Poste!’
    Of course this will have happened before.
    They’ll have it exploded, there’ll be no souvenir shell-case,
    and we’ll be left with our photographs
    taken with a camera which turns out to be broken.
    Later we’ll be at the Château Fontaine-Henry
    watching sleek daughters in jodhpurs come in from the fields.
    I’ll lie back in my green corduroy coat, and leave,
    faint, to drive off through fields of sunflowers
    without visiting the rooms we’ve paid for.
    Madame will have her fausse-couche,
    her intravenous injections, her glass ampoules,
    in a room which is all bed
    and smells of medicinal alcohol and fruit.
    The children will play on the beach, a little forlornly,
    in the wind which gusts up out of nowhere.
    Later we’ll see our friends on their lightweight bicycles
    freewheeling tiredly downhill to Asnelles.
    Their little son, propped up behind them
    will glide past, silent, though he alone sees us.
    But now we are on the beach at Cabourg,
    stopped on our walk to look where the sky’s whitening
    over the sea beyond Dives. Now a child squawks
    and races back as a wave slaps over his shorts’ hem
    to where a tanned woman with naked breasts
    fidgets her baby’s feet in the foam
    straight down from the Boulevard Marcel Proust.

Ploughing the roughlands
    It’s not the four-wheeled drive crawler
    spitting up dew and herbs,
    not Dalapon followed by dressings
    of dense phosphates,
    nor ryegrass greening behind wire as behind glass,
    not labourers wading in moonsuits
    through mud gelded by paraquat –
    but now, the sun-yellow, sky-blue
    vehicles mount the pale chalk,
    the sky bowls on the white hoops
    and white breast of the roughland,
    the farmer with Dutch eyes
    guides forward the quick plough.
    Now, flush after flush of Italian ryegrass
    furs up the roughland
    with its attentive, bright,
    levelled-off growth –
    pale monoculture
    sweating off rivers of filth
    fenced by the primary
    colours of crawler and silo.

The land pensions
    The land pensions, like rockets
    shoot off from wheat with a soft yellow
    flame-bulb: a rook or a man in black
    flaps upwards with white messages.
    On international mountains and spot markets
    little commas of wheat translate.
    The stony ground’s pumped to a dense fire
    by the flame-throwing of chemicals.
    On stony ground the wheat can ignite
    its long furls.
    The soft rocket of land pensions flies
    and is seen in Japan, covering
    conical hills with its tender stars:
    now it is firework time, remembrance
    and melt-down of autumn chrysanthemums.
    On bruised fields above Brighton
    grey mould laces the wheat harvest.
    The little rockets are black. Land pensions
    fasten on silos elsewhere, far off.
    Market men flicker and skulk like eels
    half-way across earth to breed.
    On thin chipped flint-and-bone land
    a nitrate river laces the grey wheat
    pensioning off chalk acres.

A dream of wool
    Decoding a night’s dreams
    of sheepless uplands
    the wool-merchant clings to the wool churches,
    to trade with the Low Countries,
    to profitable, downcast
    ladies swathed in wool sleeves
    whose plump, light-suffused faces
    gaze from the triptychs he worships.
    Sheep ticks, maggoty tails and foot-rot
    enter his tally of dense beasts, walking
    with a winter’s weight on their backs
    through stubborn pasture
    they graze to a hairsbreadth.
     
    From the turf of the Fire Hills
    the wool-merchant trawls
    sheep for the marsh markets.
    They fill mist with their thin cries –
    circular eddies, bemusing
    the buyers of mutton
    from sheep too wretched to fleece.
    In the right angle of morning sunshine
    the aerial photographer
    shoots from the blue,
    decodes a landscape
    of sheepless uplands
    and ploughed drove roads,
    decodes the airstream, the lapis lazuli
    coat for many compacted