EMAIL INDIGO DREAMS
SHE LOOKS OUT OF MY FACE
“Christine Bousfield paints deep, passionate pictures, takes rich evocative photographs of the ginnels and alleys of past and present. She takes nature, birth, joy, grief and loss and recasts them in the feminine, in the process celebrating an array of women and their voices and, importantly, presenting her own. From Picasso’s cracked woman to Demeter, from a subversive Eve, to a fire-footed fox, Bousfield revels in imagery, singing her poetic songs ‘of a gram, or two, of hope’, from under ‘dark canopies of leaf’.”
Rommi Smith Poet, Musician and Playwright, Poet in Residence for Keats’ House and the first Parliamentary Writer in Residence, UK.
A sparkling collection of personal poems set in Bradford, Yorkshire, focusing on generations of a family from the second world war until now, and exploring the themes of birth, death, grief, joy and repetition, particularly ‘the trials and rewards of motherhood, and even grandmotherhood’
(Gerard Benson Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust and Co-Editor of Poetry on the Underground)
Christine Bousfield is a retired lecturer in literature and psychoanalysis particularly interested in the unconscious and repetition in family relationships through generations. Her poetry is widely published in magazines and anthologies.
She occasionally reads and performs her work with music with a band called Nightdiver in festivals and other events, including Cheltenham Literature Festival, Ilkley Literature Festival, East Leeds Radio, Bradford’s Theatre in the Mill and Riverlines, York.
She also runs poetry workshops informed by psychoanalysis which work with familial and public histories.
WAITING FOR ELLA
April 2004 (tree)
From my window, I can see a tree
like a woman leaning her head to one side,
her hair white blossom.
November 2004 (conception)
Branches
blazing white curls,
damsons follow flowers
folding inwards,
dark seed.
December 2004 (implantation)
I need something stronger than form,
than any known metre, here now
where sweetness has to be, blue veins
on skin, milk rising, sap in the leaves.
Hold hold on to that slimy surface
young god, settle in its fissures,
burrow in blood, ravishment, eternity.
I call you call you metafiction, beginning
of the story, foot, fist, eye, smile, tail,
cling, suck, stay, force space from the cord,
continuous nourishing.
January 2005 (scan 1)
One gram or two of hope, weight of three four five
paperclips, eyes shut, waxy skin,
the luminescence of two-in-one.
Doppler! keep you safe, beat a long, long life,
more than a speck now, inches, ounces, her joy,
your swingboat rocking, flickering legs and arms,
yellow dots not yet drips suspended in amniotic
surges, you dropping your tail ‘raver’ ready
to somersault her August awake!
March 2005 (scan 2)
She sleeps, wakes, a sudden flicker of arms.
Cool child, self-possessed in her uterine armchair,
held whole in papery skin, brain a dark
shadow, smile a possibility.
June 2005 (scan 3)
Serious child dreaming on the uterine floor
a Pythagoras mouthing equation bubbles
into the Amniotic
She floats beyond the banded tree-womb
eyes closed the sweetness of plums
her lips cord belly uncertain hand
August 1973 (remembering)
I couldn’t make her out on the oscilloscope,
searched the shadows for Persephone,
then she broke out, launched by the waters,
shrieking the agony of spring in October.
June 2005 (knitting)
The satisfying click, increasing, purling, looping
the future, slipping one over- a neat raglan. Making up,
filling the gaps, grandmother with gifts
of her labour, her silence.
Cashmere frills for the newborn. To bring her home in,
to hallow broken thresholds. Forgiveness, hope
for good times, heartsease, foxglove, digitalis.
July 2005 (waiting)
A slow hypothesis wrung from silence.
I hold my breath, can’t speak this coming,
gradual embodiment, somersaulting
into being, flowering, August fruit.
July 2005 (imminent)
Just to say the plums are ripening in the cupboard,
love coming to fruition. Terror and joy, intransitive,
ineffable. Sit it out, rest, trust the seasons to break
two in one, the opening of flowers, ripening of berries
at the same time, on the same tree.
13th August 2005 (advent)
Just to say, she’s come, black hair, spiky, matted,
ripe cheeks, long long legs, nails, fingers like frills.
16th August 2005 (repetition)
I remember the breast pump behind flowered
curtains, you upstairs panting under the blue light.
I shed hot tears of milk cut off from you, your stare
right through me into the future.
And now you’re in the kitchen pumping
those tears, that rain. And he with her
in the sunlit living room, the pink roses.
1st September 2005 (Angel monitor )
She, sleep soothed, arms flung back above her head,
fists feeling for thumbs. See the curve of her neck,
the ammonite spiral of her ears.
Dozing, dreaming, her eyelids flicker, a trace of slate,
our faces childish drawings on the retina. Here no exercise
of will, just waiting, following the sigh-song of her breathing.
FOXTROT
Fox at the bottom of the garden,
eye to eye in the stillness of a land
drained of memory;
behind amber eyes blood moving
in who knows what carnival
whirls of skirts and bodies
rushing to the beat of a red-black fire.
Afterwards, still sitting here in the hissing
heat, I remember how you sped past me
in black-red frills on frills,
taking your sweetness with you,
grass now moving
to your irresistible dance.
INTENSIVE CARE
Golden girl under the blue light,
small chest rising and falling.
I lift you out of your transparent crib;
you murmur, look at me with a puzzled frown.
I unbutton: you shake your head until
your furious gums lock on. My womb
convulses, remembering we were
two orchids wound upon the same stem.
I thought that like the boy you couldn’t live,
felt again his clutching for breath,
but you persisted, held on tight,
tore at my flesh, demanded love.
WAKE
(for my father)
You told me once about a wake lasting three days,
every morning you were roused by voices
drunk with sorrow.
Now I, too, continue to wake and watch,
see your tender eyes brighten in familiar places
and in other faces.
I put aside the horror of that day,
your eyes half-closed, flesh warm,
no breath to answer to a name.
Finally, you looked like a stone priest; the undertaker,
catching my reverent tone, executed the work
accordingly.
Now you are ashes on my tongue
and now I sing
for your sake.
THE HARE
I’m an arctic ghost, now figure,
now ground, a shiver
on the white horizon;
a fierce and cunning mother,
I bear bone-aching cold,
a tenth of my life each gestation;
teach my young by secret visits
to found their form snug as skin,
each tastes my elixir for five minutes
before I freeze again with the sun.
Yes, I am white as the foot of the Virgin,
eyes set on heaven;
my children, melancholy,
drink my songs in darkness.
But I have two faces, two dances to wrong-foot
the gods. I scurry, a shadow, carrying wild grasses
to those they would see die.
WHITE OUT
No satellites here. Even the old telegraph pole up the hill
is swathed in ivy, hops, waving bindweed,
footed by rhododendron gnawing into its wires.
At night we are pitch black, cut off from
the information highway. Dark matter has gravitational effects, light, too, draws everything to it like these moths
and ginny spinners banging against my window.
From space, we’re a scattering of light across the cold
Northern Hemisphere-we see only stars, collisions
a thousand thousand years old, a history of accidents,
who did what to whom, and in what circumstances,
how best to father and mother an Olympic hurdler,
or a king. But I have no time for celebrities, feel only
the enveloping dark, briar rose petals scattered across disappearing hills, one rook calling to another in the aspens.
STRAWBERRIES FOR JUDE
Hey! Remember the party we had by the river,
rolling chocolate -coated strawberries whole
on the tongue till the shock, the crush,
the red-stained saliva?
you in the water as good as naked, calling come
in, it's cool. You look like an ancient priestess
celebrating Dionysian rites of pure pleasure.
Now we overblown roses knocking on fifty odd
remember our sixties' sowing when love
was the fashion, we wore striped stockings,
laughed at sensible men.
How we joked about age and sadness, said we'd have
zipped- together -wheel-chairs and crocheted hats
to throw in the air on Sunday afternoon seaside excursions,
run amok in Myrtle Park with zimmers,
cheat at bowls. And we forgot the frozen fields,
the shrivelled buds, the berries of grey-
green that turn to dust with a touch.
Ah, Jude! forget our sad song: our fifty luscious years
upon us, let's idle on the moors or in suburban gardens
after six pm, remembering strawberry days forever.
WIZARD
You always were a bit of a lad: remember when I gave you
eleven quid to buy a warm coat, you came back
with that wizard cape and hat from Leeds?
They sent you home from school for taking
the piss out of the institution, a ridiculous trick,
what kind of mother is she?
But every Christmas, your face bright under red curls,
you leap from corner to corner like fire flashing,
now it’s a ukulele, cheapo keyboards hammering all day,
then the double-bass with Grandpa’s five hundred got
with fiddle playing, next the recording unit, cu- bass
and all those floppy discs on the never-never.
Later I sing as you cut a rhythm out of nowhere,
you’re twenty-eight on Wednesday at three p.m.,
I’ve bought you yellow Perspex cuff-links with red stars.
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