Out of the Blue by Helen Dunmore Page A

water,
    but a man came and took water from the well
    and a woman came and took water from the well
    and a man took water from the well again
                     and the well could not drink
                     from the low, slack water-table.
    The well lacked a sense of its own danger
    and a man came to take water from the well
    and a woman came to take water from the well
                     but as the man was coming again
                     the well sighed in the dry darkness,
                     the well spoke in a quiet voice
                     from the deep-down bell of its emptiness
                     Give me some water .
    But the man was at work with his heavy bucket
    and he cried cheerfully, Wait half a minute,
    I will just draw one more bucketful!
    When he swung it up it was full of dust
    and he was angry with the well.
    Could it not have held out longer?
    He had only needed one more bucketful.

Heron
    It’s evening on the river,
    steady, milk-warm,
    the nettles head-down
    with feasting caterpillars,
    the current turning,
    thin as a blade-bone.
    Reed-mace shivers.
    I’m miles from anywhere.
    Who’s looking?
    did a fish jump?
    – and then a heron goes up
    from its place by the willow.
    With ballooning flight
    it picks up the sky
    and makes off, loaded.
    I wasn’t looking,
    I heard the noise of its wings
    and I turned,
    I thought of a friend,
    a cool one with binoculars,
    here’s rarity
    with big wing-flaps, suiting itself.

One yellow chicken
    One yellow chicken
    she picks up expertly and not untenderly
    from the conveyor of chickens.
    Its soft beak gobbles feverishly
    at a clear liquid which might be
    a dose of sugar-drenched serum –
    the beak’s flexible membrane
    seems to engulf the chicken
    as it tries to fix on the dropper’s glass tip.
    Clear yellow juice gulps through a tube
    and a few drops, suddenly colourless,
    swill round a gape wide as the brim of a glass
    but the chicken doesn’t seem afraid –
    or only this much, only for this long
    until the lab assistant flicks it back on
    to the slowly moving conveyor of chickens
    and it tumbles, catches itself,
    then buoyed up by the rest
    reels out of sight, cheeping.

Sailing to Cuba
    I’d climbed the crab-apple in the wind
    that wild season of Cuba,
    I leaned out on the twigs
    to where clouds heeled over like sails
    on the house-bounded horizon,
    but even from here I felt the radio throb
    like someone who was there when the accident happened
    ‘not two yards from where I was standing’,
    then Big Band music cha-cha’d from room to room
    to fill in time between news.
    At school we learned ‘Quinquireme of Nineveh
    from distant Ophir…’ The ships nudged closer.
    The wind roared to itself like applause.

Off the West Pier
    Dropped yolks of shore-lamp quiver on tarmac –
    the night’s disturbed and the sea itself
    sidles about after its storm, buttery,
    melting along the groynes.
    The sea’s a martinet with itself,
    will come this far and no farther
    like a Prussian governess
    corrupted by white sugar –
    Oh but the stealth
    with which it twitches aside mortar
    and licks, and licks
    moist grains off the shore.
    By day it simply keeps marching
    beat after beat like waves of soldiers
    timed to the first push. In step with the music
    it swells greenness and greyness, spills foam
    onto a fly-swarming tide-line –
    beertabs and dropped King Cones,
    flotsam of inopportune partners
    sticky with what came after.
    A man lies on his back
    settled along the swell, his knees
    glimmering, catching a lick of moonlight,
    lazy as a seagull on Christmas morning –
    He should have greased himself with whale-blubber
    like a twelve-year-old Goddess-chested
    cross-Channel swimmer.
    His sadness stripes through him like ink
    leaving no space or him.
    He paws slow arm sweeps and rolls
    where the sea shoulders him.
    Up there an aeroplane falters,
    its red landing-lights