from
FLOWERS AND INSECTS
A Violet at Lough Aughresberg
The tide-swell grinds crystal, under cliffs.
Against the opened furnace of the West –
A branch of apple-blossom.
A bullock of sooted bronze
Cools on an emerald
That is crumbling to granite embers.
Milk and blood are frail
In the shivering wind off the sea.
Only a purple flower – this amulet
(Once Prospero’s) – holds it all, a moment,
In a rinsed globe of light.
Two Tortoiseshell Butterflies
Mid-May – after May frosts that killed the Camellias,
After May snow. After a winter
Worst in human memory, a freeze
Killing the hundred-year-old Bay Tree,
And the ten-year-old Bay Tree – suddenly
A warm limpness. A blue heaven just veiled
With the sweatings of earth
And with the sweatings-out of winter
Feverish under the piled
Maywear of the lawn.
Now two
Tortoiseshell butterflies, finding themselves alive,
She drunk with the earth-sweat, and he
Drunk with her, float in eddies
Over the Daisies’ quilt. She prefers Dandelions,
Settling to nod her long spring tongue down
Into the nestling pleats, into the flower’s
Thick-folded throat, her wings high-folded.
He settling behind her, among plain glistenings
Of the new grass, edging and twitching
To nearly touch – pulsing and convulsing
Wings wide open to tight-closed to flat open
Quivering to keep her so near, almost reaching
To stroke her abdomen with his antennae –
Then she’s up and away, and he startlingly
Swallowlike overtaking, crowding her, heading her
Off any escape. She turns that
To her purpose, and veers down
Onto another Dandelion, attaching
Her weightless yacht to its crest.
Wobbles to stronger hold, to deeper, sweeter
Penetration, her wings tight shut above her,
A sealed book, absorbed in itself.
She ignores him
Where he edges to left and to right, flitting
His wings open, titillating her fur
With his perfumed draughts, spasming his patterns,
His tropical, pheasant appeals of folk-art,
Venturing closer, grass-blade by grass-blade,
Trembling with inhibition, nearly touching –
And again she’s away, dithering blackly. He swoops
On an elastic to settle accurately
Under her tail again as she clamps to
This time a Daisy. She’s been chosen,
Courtship has claimed her. And he’s been conscripted
To what’s required
Of the splitting bud, of the talented robin
That performs piercings
Out of the still-bare ash,
The whole air just like him, just breathing
Over the still-turned-inward earth, the first
Caresses of the wedding coming, the earth
Opening its petals, the whole sky
Opening a flower
Of unfathomably-patterned pollen.
Where I Sit Writing My Letter
Suddenly hooligan baby starlings
Rain all round me squealing,
Shouting how it’s tremendous and everybody
Has to join in and they’re off this minute!
Probably the weird aniseed corpse-odour
Of the hawthorn flower’s disturbed them,
As it disturbs me. Now they all rise
Flutter-floating, oddly eddying,
Squalling their dry gargles. Then, mad, they
Hurl off, on a new wrench of excitement,
Leaving me out.
I pluck apple-blossom,
Cool, blood-lipped, wet open.
And I’m just quieting thoughts towards my letter
When they all come storming back,
Giddy with hoarse hissings and snarls
And clot the top of an ash sapling –
Sizzling bodies, snaky black necks craning
For a fresh thrill – Where next? Where now? Where? – they’re off
All rushing after it
Leaving me fevered, and addled.
They can’t believe their wings.
Snow-bright clouds boil up.
Ternfor
Norman
Nicholson
The breaker humps its green glass.
You see the sunrise through it, the wrack dark in it,
And over it – the bird of sickles
Swimming in the wind, with oiled spasm.
That is the tern. A blood-tipped harpoon
Hollow-ground in the roller-dazzle,
Honed in the wind-flash, polished
By his own expertise –
Now finished and in use.
The wings – remote-controlled
By the eyes
In his submarine swift shadow
Feint and tilt in their steel.
Suddenly a triggered magnet
Connects him downward, through a thin shatter,
To a sand-eel. He hoists out, with a twinkling,
Through some other wave-window.
His eye is a gimlet.
Deep in the churned grain of the roller
His brain is a gimlet. He hangs,
A blown tatter, a precarious word
In the mouth of ocean pronouncements.
His meaning has no margin. He shudders
To the tips of his tail-tines.
Momentarily, his lit scrap is a shriek.
The Honey Bee
The Honey Bee
Brilliant as Einstein’s idea
Can’t be taught a thing.
Like the sun, she’s on course forever.
As if nothing else at all existed
Except her flowers.
No mountains, no cows, no beaches, no shops.
Only the rainbow waves of her flowers
A tremor in emptiness
A flying carpet of flowers
– a pattern
Coming and going – very loosely woven –
Out of which she works her solutions.
Furry goblin midgets
(The beekeeper’s thoughts) clamber stickily
Over the sun’s face – gloves of shadow.
But the Honey Bee
Cannot imagine him, in her brilliance,
Though he’s a stowaway on her carpet of colour-waves
And drinks her sums.
Sunstruck Foxglove
As you bend to touch
The gypsy girl
Who waits for you in the hedge
Her loose dress falls open.
Midsummer ditch-sickness!
Flushed, freckled with earth-fever,
Swollen lips parted, her eyes closing,
A lolling armful, and so young! Hot
Among the insane spiders.
You glimpse the reptile under-speckle
Of her sunburned breasts
And your head swims. You close your eyes.
Can the foxes talk? Your head throbs.
Remember the bird’s tolling echo,
The dripping fern-roots, and the butterfly touches
That woke you.
Remember your mother’s
Long, dark dugs.
Her silky body a soft oven
For loaves of pollen.
Eclipse
For half an hour, through a magnifying glass,
I’ve watched the spiders making love undisturbed,
Ignorant of the voyeur, horribly happy.
First in the lower left-hand corner of the window
I saw an average spider stirring. There
In a midden of carcases, the shambles
Of insects dried in their colours,
A trophy den of uniforms, reds, greens,
Yellow-striped and detached wing-frails, last year’s
Leavings, parched a winter, scentless – heads,
Bodices, corsets, leg-shells, a crumble of shards
In a museum of dust and neglect, there
In the crevice, concealed by corpses in their old wrappings,
A spider has come to live. She has spun
An untidy nearly invisible
Floss of strands, a few aimless angles
Camouflaged as the grey dirt of the rain-stains
On the glass. I saw her moving. Then a smaller,
Just as ginger, similar all over,
Only smaller. He had suddenly appeared.
Upside down, she was doing a gentle
Sinister dance. All legs clinging
Except for those leading two, which tapped on the web,
Trembling it, I thought, like a fly, to attract
The immobile, upside-down male, near the frame,
Only an inch from her. He moved away,
Turning ready to flee, I guessed. Maybe
Fearful of her intentions and appetites:
Doubting. But her power, focussing,
Making no error after the millions of years
Perfecting this art, turned him round
At a distance of two inches, and hung him
Upside down, head under, belly towards her.
Motionless, except for a faint
And just-detectable throb of his hair-leg tips.
She came closer, upside down, gently,
And enmeshed his forelegs in hers.
So, I imagined, here is the famous murder.
I got closer to watch. Something
Difficult to understand, difficult
To properly observe was going on.
Her two hands seemed swollen, like tiny crab-claws.
Those two nippers she folds up under her nose
To bring things to her pincers, they were moving,
Glistening. He convulsed now and again.
Her abdomen pod twitched – spasmed slightly
Little mean ecstasies. Was she pulling him to pieces?
Something much more delicate, a much more
Delicate agreement was in process.
Under his abdomen he had a nozzle –
Presumably his lumpy little cock,
Just as ginger as the rest of him, a teat,
An infinitesimal nipple. Probably
Under a microscope it is tooled and designed
Like some micro-device in a space rocket.
To me it looked crude and simple. Far from simple,
Though, were her palps, her boxing-glove nippers –
They were like the mechanical hands
That manipulate radio-active matter
On the other side of safe screen glass.
But hideously dexterous. She reached out one,
I cannot imagine how she saw to do it,
And brought monkey-fingers from under her crab-nippers
And grasped his nipple cock. As soon as she had it
A bubble of glisteny clear glue
Ballooned up from her nipper, the size of her head,
Then shrank back, and as it shrank back
She wrenched her grip off his cock
As if it had locked there, and doubled her fistful
Of shining wet to her jaw-pincers
And rubbed her mouth and underskin with it,
Six, seven stiff rubs, while her abdomen twitched,
Her tail-tip flirted, and he hung passive.
Then out came her other clutcher, on its elbow,
And grabbed his bud, and the gloy-thick bubble
Swelled above her claws, a red spur flicked
Inside it, and he jerked in his ropes.
Then the bubble shrank and she twisted it off
And brought it back to stuff her face-place
With whatever it was. Very still,
Except for those stealths and those twitchings
They hung upside down, face to face,
Holding forelegs. It was still obscure
Just what was going on. It went on.
Half an hour. Finally she backed off.
He hung like a dead spider, just as he’d hung
All the time she’d dealt with him.
I thought it must be over. So now, I thought,
I see the murder. I could imagine now
If he stirred she’d think he was a fly,
And she’d be feeling ravenous. And so far
She’d shown small excitement about him
With all that concentration on his attachment,
As if he upside down were just the table
Holding the delicacy. She moved off.
Aimlessly awhile she moved round,
Till I realized she was concentrating
On a V of dusty white, a delta
Of floss that seemed just fuzz. Then I could see
How she danced her belly low in the V.
I saw her fitting, with accurate whisker-fine feet,
Blobs of glue to the fibres, and sticking others
To thicken and deepen the V, and knot its juncture.
Then she danced in place, belly down, on this –
Suddenly got up and hung herself
Over the V. Sitting in the cup of the V
Was a tiny blob of new whiteness.
A first egg? Already? Then very carefully
She dabbed at the blob, and worked more woolly fibres
Into the V, to either side of it,
Diminishing it as she dabbed. I could see
I was watching mighty nature
In a purposeful mood, but not what she worked at.
Soon, the little shapeless dot of white
Was a dreg of speck, and she left it. She returned
Towards her male, who hung still in position.
She paused and laboriously cleaned her hands,
Wringing them in her pincers. And suddenly
With a swift, miraculously-accurate snatch
Took something from her mouth, and dumped it
On an outermost cross-strand of web –
A tiny scrap of white – refuse, I thought,
From their lovemaking. So I stopped watching.
Ten minutes later they were at it again.
Now they have vanished. I have scrutinized
The whole rubbish tip of carcases
And the window-frame crannies beneath it.
They are hidden. Is she devouring him now?
Or are there still some days of bliss to come
Before he joins her antiques. They are hidden
Probably together in the fusty dark,
Holding forearms, listening to the rain, rejoicing
As the sun’s edge, behind the clouds,
Comes clear of our shadow.