Read Out of the Blue for Free Online Page A

sweets.
    The hall fills quickly and neatly.
    If they keep still as water
        I’ll know them.
    I look but I can’t be certain:
    my nephews with heavy eyelids
    blowing in the last touches of daylight
    my sisters raising them up like torches.

Greenham Common
    Today is barred with darkness of winter.
    In cold tents women protest,
    for once unveiled, eyes stinging with smoke.
    They stamp round fires in quilted anoraks,
    glamourless, they laugh often
    and teach themselves to speak eloquently.
    Mud and the camp’s raw bones
    set them before the television camera.
    Absent, the women of old photographs
    holding the last of their four children,
    eyes darkened, hair covered,
    bodies waxy as cyclamen;
    absent, all these suffering ones.
    New voices rip at the throat,
    new costumes, metamorphoses.
    Soft-skirted, evasive
    women were drawn from the ruins,
    swirls of ash on them like veils.
    History came as a seducer
    and said: this is the beauty of women
    in bombfall. Dolorous
    you curl your skirts over your sleeping children.
    Instead they stay at this place
    all winter; eat from packets and jars,
    keep sensible, don’t hunger,
    battle each day at the wires.

Poem for hidden women
    ‘Fuck this staring paper and table –
    I’ve just about had enough of it.
    I’m going out for some air,’
    he says, letting the wind bang up his sheets of poems.
    He walks quickly; it’s cool,
    and rainy sky covers both stars and moon.
    Out of the windows come slight
    echoes of conversations receding upstairs.
    There. He slows down.
    A dark side-street – thick bushes –
    he doesn’t see them.
    He smokes. Leaves can stir as they please.
    (We clack like jackrabbits from pool to pool of lamplight.
    Stretching our lips, we walk exposed
    as milk cattle past heaps of rubbish
    killed by the edge
    of knowledge that trees hide
    a face slowly detaching itself
    from shadow, and starting to smile.)
    The poet goes into the steep alleys
    close to the sea, where fish scales line the gutter
    and women prostitute themselves to men
    as men have described in many poems.
    They’ve said how milky, or bitter
    as lemons they find her –
    the smell of her hair
    …vanilla…cinnamon…
    there’s a smell for every complexion.
    Cavafy tells us he went always
    to secret rooms and purer vices;
    he wished to dissociate himself
    from the hasty unlacings of citizens
    fumbling, capsizing –
    white
    flesh in a mound and kept from sight,
    but he doesn’t tell us
    whether these boys’ hair always smelled of cinnamon
    or if their nights cost more than spices.
    A woman goes into the night café,
    chooses a clean
    knife and a spoon
    and takes up her tray.
    Quickly the manageress leans from the counter.
    (As when a policeman arrests a friend
    her eyes plunge and her voice roughens.)
    She points to a notice with her red nail:
    ‘After 11 we serve only accompanied females.’
    The woman fumbles her grip
    on her bag, and it slips.
    Her forces tumble.
    People look on as she scrabbles
    for money and tampax.
    A thousand shadows accompany her
    down the stiff lino, through the street lighting.
     
    The poet sits in a harbour bar
    where the tables are smooth and solid to lean on.
    It’s peaceful. Men gaze
    for hours at beer and brass glistening.
    The sea laps. The door swings.
    The poet feels poems
    invade him. All day he has been stone-breaking
    he says. He would be happier in cafés
    in other countries, drinking, watching;
    he feels he’s a familiar sort of poet
    but he’s at ease with it.
    Besides, he’s not actually writing a poem:
    there’s plenty, he’s sure,
    in drink and hearing the sea move.
     
    For what is Emily Dickinson doing
    back at the house – the home?
    A doctor emerges, wiping his face,
    and pins a notice on the porch.
    After a while you don’t even ask.
    No history
    gets at this picture:
    a woman named Sappho
    sat in bars by purple water
    with her feet crossed at the ankles
    and her hair flaming with violets
    never smiling when she didn’t feel like