FIELD NOTES: WATCHING THE CREW OF ATLANTIS RENOVATING THE HUBBLE TELESCOPE

“A poet’s hope,” wrote WH Auden, is “to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.” Acclaimed overseas but less known in England, Jude Nutter fits that bill, perhaps because the Yorkshire-born poet has no UK publisher (preferring Ireland’s superb Salmon Press). This poem from her latest, terrific volume Dead Reckoning slips between images of her dying mother in hospital, and of astronauts in space – both “tethered / to a machine” for air, hovering at a frontier. Tristram Fane Saunders

What comforts me most is imagining the calm, regular draw and blow of their breathing; that they are floating, for a while,

in exile and surviving because after weeks of drifting tethered to a machine that pulled in the room’s ambient air, compressed it and vented off its nitrogen with such a quiet and relentless suck and surge, my mother had crossed into the homeland no one is equipped to travel through. Tethered

securely, and laden with tools and equipment, the astronauts bury their arms, elbow-deep, into the silver torso of the telescope. Beneath them, across the

Earth, night’s precise curve approaching and nothing around them but the constant wash of their own breathing. What I

remember most

about my mother’s last breath was the way her

eyes opened slightly – slim buttonholes in the body’s fabric – and my father rising out of his chair to lean over the bed’s chrome railing, to get as close to her as he could, to rest his forehead against hers and whisper hello, Eileen; and I found myself

thinking about that white and half-wild pony in the pasture next door; the way, each morning, behind a single strand of fence wire, it waited – a solid, pale patience – for my father to trail through the damp nap of the lawn with his small offering;

the way it would lower its head, then, to press against him, with such restraint, the long, heavy treasure of its skull.

The thick plate of the forehead. Each nostril’s soft cuff. But it was over

already and that machine went on breathing without her until I rocked its small red switch into silence. There was the fixed curve of my father’s spine. There was the still weight of his head against hers. Our first night on Earth without her. Wind in the hawthorn and the great carnival wheel of stars. The astronauts

are repairing the gyros; they are fitting the spectrograph and the wide-field cameras that will allow us to gaze right onto the cosmic frontier. And the undertaker

unzipped the dark

bloom of his body bag. Later, the froth of the first birds, and the lights of the fleet roped three deep along the quay fraying in a dawn that arrived like wood smoke and, for a while, my father and I not knowing how to be with each other. With their gentle

and deliberate gestures the two astronauts appear almost tender, like lovers.

The visors of their helmets are golden blisters of reflected light. It is impossible to gauge the ferocity of thought inside them.

From Dead Reckoning (Salmon, £12)