Read Out of the Blue for Free Online

hands batting the air,
    forehead still smeared,
    – now, suddenly, he stands there
    upright and rounded as a tulip.
    The garden sparkles through the windows.
    Dark and a heap in my arms;
    the thermostat clicking all night.
    Out in the road beached cars and winter
    so cold five minutes would finish you.
    Light fell in its pools
    each evening. Tranquilly
    it stamped the same circles.
    Friends shifted their boots on the step.
    Their faces gleamed from their scarves
    that the withdrawal of day
    brought safety.
    Experience so stitched, intimate,
    mutes me.
    Now I’m desperate for solitude.
    The house enrages me.
    I go miles, pushing the pram,
    thinking about Christina Rossetti’s
    black dresses – my own absent poems.
    I go miles, touching his blankets proudly,
    drawing the quilt to his lips.
    I write of winter and the approaches to winter.
    Air clings to me, rotten Lord Derbies,
    patched in their skins, thud down.
    The petals of Michaelmas daisies give light.
    Now I’m that glimpsed figure for children
    occupying doorways and windows;
    that breath of succulence
    ignored till nightfall.

    I go out before the curtains are drawn
    and walk close to the windows
    which shine secretly.
    Bare to the street
    red pleats of a lampshade expose
    bodies in classic postures, arguing.
    Their senseless jokes explode with saliva.
    I mop and tousle.
    It’s three o’clock in the cul-de-sac.
    Out of the reach of traffic,
    free from the ply
    of bodies glancing and crossing,
    the shopping, visiting,
    cashing orders at the post office,
    I lie on my bed in the sun
    drawing down streams of babble.
    This room holds me, a dull
    round bulb stubbornly
    rising year after year in the same place.

The night chemist
    In the chemist’s at night-time
    swathed counters and lights turned down
    lean and surround us.
    Waiting for our prescriptions
    we clock these sounds:
    a baby’s peaked hush,
    hawked breath.
    I pay a pound
    and pills fall in my curled palms.
    Holding their white packages tenderly
    patients track back to the pain.
    ‘Why is the man shouting?’ Oliver asks me.
    I answer, ‘He wants to go home.’
    Softly, muffled by cloth
    the words still come
    and the red-streaked drunkard goes past us,
    rage scalding us.
    I would not dare bring happiness
    into the chemist’s at night-time.
    Its gift-wrapped lack of assistance still presses
    as suffering closes the blinded windows.

St Paul’s
    This evening clouds darken the street quickly,
    more and more grey
    flows throngh the yellowing treetops,
    traffic flies downhill
    roaring and spangled with faces,
    full buses
    rock past the Sussex Place roundabout.
    In Sussex the line of Downs
    has no trees to uncover,
    no lick of the town’s wealth, blue
    in smoke, no gold, fugitive dropping.
    In villages old England
    checks rainfall, sick of itself.
    Here there are scraps and flashes:
    bellying food smells – last-minute buying –
    plantain, quarters of ham.
    The bread shop lady pulls down
    loaves that will make tomorrow’s cheap line.
    On offer are toothpaste and shoe soles
    mended same day for Monday’s interview
    and a precise network of choices
    for old women collecting their pension
    on Thursday, already owing the rent man.
    Some places are boarded. You lose your expectancy –
    soon it appears you never get home. Still
    it’s fine on evenings and in October
    to settle here. Still the lights splashing look beautiful.

Poem for December 28
    My nephews with almond faces
    black hair like bunces of grapes
             (the skin stroked and then bruised
             the head buried and caressed)
    he takes his son’s head in his hands
    kisses it     blesses it     leaves it:
    the boy with circles under his eyes like damsons
    not the blond baby, the stepson.
    In the forest stories about the black
    father     the jew     the incubus
    if there are more curses they fall on us.
    Behind the swinging ropes of their isolation
    my nephews wait, sucking their