Free Out of the Blue by Helen Dunmore Page B

skeletons
    seaming the chalk by the sea.

New crops
    O engines
    flying over the light, barren
    as shuttles, thrown over a huge
    woof
    crossply
    of hedgeless snail tracks,
    you are so high,
    you’ve felled the damp crevices
    you’ve felled the boulder-strewn meadow
    the lichen
    the strong plum tree.
    O engines
    swaying your rubber batons
    on pods, on ripe lupins,
    on a chameleon terrace
    of greenlessness,
    you’re withdrawn from a sea
    of harvests, you’re the foreshore
    of soaked soil leaching
    undrinkable streams.

Shadows of my mother against a wall
    The wood-pigeon rolls soft notes off its breast
    in a tree which grows by a fence.
    The smell of creosote,
    easy as wild gum
    oozing from tree boles
    keeps me awake. A thunderstorm
    heckles the air.
    I step into a bedroom
    pungent with child’s sleep,
    and lift the potty and pile of picture books
    so my large shadow
    crosses his eyes.
    Sometimes at night, expectant,
    I think I see the shadow of my mother
    bridge a small house of enormous rooms.
    Here are white, palpable walls
    and stories of my grandmother:
    the old hours of tenderness I missed.

Air layering
    The rain was falling down in slow pulses
    between the horse-chestnuts, as if it would set root there.
    It was a slate-grey May evening
    luminous with new leaves.
    I was at a talk on the appearances of Our Lady
    these past five years at Medjugorje.
    We sat in a small room in the Presbytery:
    the flow of the video scratched, the raindrop
    brimmed its meniscus upon the window
    from slant runnel to sill.
    Later I watched a programme on air layering.
    The round rootball steadied itself
    high as a chaffinch nest, and then deftly
    the gardener severed the new plant.
    She knew its wounded stem would have made roots there.

The argument
    It was too hot, that was the argument.
    I had to walk a mile with my feet flaming
    from brown sandals and sun.
    Now the draggling shade of the privet made me to dawdle,
    now soft tarmac had to be crossed.
    I was lugging an old school-bag –
    it was so hot the world was agape with it.
    One limp rose fell as I passed.
    An old witch sat in her front garden
    under the spokes of a black umbrella
    lashed to her kitchen chair.
    God was in my feet as I fled past her.
    Everyone I knew was so far away.
    The yellow glob of my ice cream melted and spread.
    I bought it with huge pennies, held up.
    ‘A big one this time!’ the man said,
    so I ate on though it cloyed me.
    It was for fetching the bread
    one endless morning before Bank Holiday.
    I was too young, that was the argument,
    and had to propitiate everyone:
    the man with the stroke, and the burnt lady
    whose bared, magical teeth made me
    smile if I could –
    Oh the cowardice of my childhood!

The peach house
    The dry glasshouse is almost empty.
    A few pungent geraniums with lost markings
    lean in their pots.
    It is nothing but a cropping place for sun
    on cold Northumbrian July days.
    The little girl, fresh from suburbia,
    cannot believe in the peaches she finds here.
    They are green and furry as monkeys –
    she picks them and drops them.
    All the same they are matched to the word peach
    and must mean more than she sees. She will post them
    unripe in a tiny envelope
    to her eight-year-old class-mates, and write
    carefully in the ruled-up spaces:
    ‘Where we are the place is a palace.’

A meditation on the glasshouses
    The bald glasshouses stretch here for miles.
    For miles air-vents open like wings.
    This is the land of reflections, of heat
    flagging from. mirror to mirror. Here cloches
    force on the fruit by weeks, while pulses
    of light run down the chain of glasshouses
    and blind the visitors this Good Friday.
    The daffodil pickers are spring-white.
    Their neat heads in a fuzz of sun
    stoop to the buds, make leafless
    bunches of ten for Easter.
    A white thumb touches the peat
    but makes no print. This is the soil-less
    Eden of glasshouses, heat-stunned.

The haunting of Epworth
    Epworth Rectory was the childhood home of John Wesley. In