The Bee Hut (3 page)

as raucously persistent

as the dawn crowing chorus

of her vicious adored

golden roosters.

Or she was cheating –

and the
Bone Scan
poems

were written

when she was well

and safely remembering

her Plague Year

as she put on the kettle

and set out her shining

pens.

MULTIPLEX

Every night

MULTIPLEX

shines through my hospital

window

big blue neoned letters

aimed vertically

at the thick dark sky

like a rocket

steadying its nerve

on a launching pad.

Hiya, MULTIPLEX.

Whoever you are

you look like

you're going places.

Take me with you.

ODE TO AGATHA CHRISTIE

Is this the crucial clue?

The bug-like trilobite

I bought from a slippery gypsy

in Prague,

still staring through its crystalline eyes

from the floor of an extinct sea.

I am spooked

by the abysmal depths

of my own life's mystery.

Like a belly-up Christie village

I'm nipped by the red herrings

of every pyrrhic victory.

Can I pocket and know this sunset

flaring over the rollers

of the cold Bass Sea?

No photograph, no poem

will make it anything

but a still-born cliché.

Is murdering time

the most true and convincing

perfect crime?

I tangle in the plot

chasing the hit-and-run driver

of my careless past tense.

Why does my childhood swimming pool

now stagnate darkly

behind a high wire fence?

I rub my clever egg head

and show off my waxed

moustache.

O Agatha, what fun playing

Poirot

to douse my fear in farce!

But how can I make

my solution ship arrive?

To what shimmering port

will it take me?

Or is it just an easy exile

from blind faith and wishful talk?

Death Comes as the End
–

Agatha, you threw out cosy

when you served up dread.

As surely as my trilobite

with the right time, place

and gritty clout,

may I be preserved

as insoluble enigma

when a killer comet snuffs me out.

THE BEE HUT

For Robert Colvin

There is a dark place

on my friend Robert's farm

that thrums

with the nectar smell

of danger.

A swarm of bees

has taken over

a dozing old shed

and no one

has the means

or guts

to move them.

I think of slaughtered

Mycenean kings

entombed in their brick

hive

glittering as they lie

golder than honey

in the old blood

dark.

Entranced

my bare hand

wants to plunge

through a hole –

now a buzzing lethal

highway –

in the shed wall.

I love the bee hut

on my friend Robert's farm.

I love the invisible mystery

of its delicious industry.

But do I love the lesson

of my thralldom

to the sweet dark things

that can do me harm?

S
MELLING
T
IGERS

THE SNOW LINE

I could smell

the snow line

but I just kept

talking

talking

and climbing

with this

glimmering

young man

who was talking to me

about death

how

a good dose of death

if you truly drink it

is a gift

a gift

a fresh cold

slap

a fresh dark

creek

you'll never sleep-walk

through your life

again

again

I wonder now

as I wondered then

in the seeping ambrosia

of pine trees

if I was climbing

effortlessly climbing

if I was talking

effortlessly talking

with a god

a god

who never touched me

or told me

his name

a god

of sweet chill

mountain air

sense

a comradely god

of wing-booted

presence.

SMELLING TIGERS

Waiting.

Starched hospital gown.

Frozen present tense.

Why am I smelling

tigers?

Muffled white noise.

Bleached magazines.

Why am I sniffing

the steaming black scat

of tigers?

When I get my life back

When I am clear of here

I will go

like a blind blessed arrow

where I can wallow

in the elixir

of tiger.

NOT THE SAME

When you climb

out a black well

you are not the same

you come to

in the blue air

with a long sore scar

circling your chest

like the shoreline

of a deep new sea

your hands are webbed

inviting you

to trust yourself

in water stranger

and wilder

than you've ever known

your heart has a kick

your eyes have

a different bite

you have emerged

from some dark wonder

you can't explain

you are not the same

THE SEA HARE

Don't bargain

I tell myself

as I scoop up the stranded sea hare

gasping on the hot dry rock.

Can it hurt me?

I know nothing about sea hares.

Do they too make desperate deals

with their deathless invertebrate gods?

Eerie to carry

like an extraterrestrial

yellow-green marooned jelly snail

heavy in my towel.

Can it hurt me?

Just bless and release it

and fight the urge to count

your sticky Karma beads.

Don't bargain.

Just grab the swishing tail

of your nerve's latest adventure

and go with the inevitable tide.

You know nothing

about sea hares

but you know the prayer

of your own shivering gut.

And it's bargaining bargaining

for the sea hare for the sea hare

and the future of both

our unknowable lives.

ON NORFOLK ISLAND WITH BRUCE

This time last year I was on chemo

And bald in a week

Then another shock came out of the blue

To tell me you'd died in your sleep.

Too sick and groggy to go

Stunned to your funeral

Instead I raked the sky for your soul's bird

From the walls of my fumarole.

Now I'm here and healthy

Among the huge Norfolk pines

That wander like friendly free-range cattle

Through so many of your Manly lines.

I'm carrying your last book

Everywhere like a love affaire

A potent amulet against all my ghosts

That fret my gut with dead cold air.

Suddenly a local kingfisher flashes

Like a blue lightning crack

Through the salt-scoured stones of this cemetery –

I know it's you, Bruce, electrically back.

And I stand with my new hair

On unearthly fire

Under the tail of your azure comet

Watching you burnish this transient sky.

SPEARS

For F.H.P.

I know what I want

as I walk

through this valley

of Unknowing

I want my spears

my lost my burnt

spears

these bright birds know

these strange trees

must hear me

I want my spears

I cannot conquer

the past –

the bonfire. the sealed shed.

Too late to strangle

dead bigots.

But

never again

if my spears return

will a filthy fire touch them

never again

will their sanctuary

be ransacked.

Yes I am a man

without cover

but now ready

with my old

young man's

glory

I will have my life

ceremonial

sacred

I want my spears.

NIGHT RAIN

You have never slept

under night rain

spiritually tip-tapping

on a monastery roof.

Chinese Sung poets

wisely

would save

this kind of saturating

tranquillity

for withdrawn old age.

Night rain

for the unwithered

isn't always

a muffling lullaby.

Remember

that night the black sky

came roaring for you.

Ravaged awake

you lay quivering

under rain

like a bestial meteor shower

bloodying the roof.

It was astral

shock.

Your heart nearly

stopped.

Some night rain isn't meant

for enlightening

pensioners.

FOGGY WINDOWS

You can't preserve love

behind foggy windows

believe me

when your back is finally

turned

she steps out

shakes herself down

does her lipstick

and walks away

perhaps with an insouciant

swing to the hips

that would hurt

if you insisted

on looking back

if you regretted

not shackling her

in your car forever

but you don't want to spend

the rest of your life

blubbering in torn pieces

like Orpheus

or tasting a toxic dollop

of Lot's wife

on congealing cold eggs

so you don't fight it

you don't fight

love's right

to wind down

your precious

foggy windows.

RIMBAUD

For Michael Brennan

O saisons, o châteaux!

why did I stop

reading Rimbaud?

At twenty I was

convinced

I could read

to the rippling

roof

of seerdom

and jump.

There were so many things

I didn't yet know

about life, about Rimbaud.

I didn't know

you can grow

a grey immunity

to the most ardently

poisonous magic.

And that an older

even reliably dissolute

seducer

like Verlaine

so easily becomes

more foolish leech

than infernal lover.

Instead I ate caramel

ice cream

with those

as bullet-proofed

safe

as I was.

There are some things

reading poetry

can't deliver

or fix.

O saisons, o châteaux!

what illuminating

what absolutely necessary

Season in Hell

did I miss?

THE HORSEHEAD NEBULA

I was in Barcelona

late one Spring

when an insistent twilight

smoked me out

of my monastic hotel room

into the street.

I found myself

snared by the feral smell

of some amazing strange music

pulsing like a bull-ring

with singing and stamping.

My shy feet

were their usual lead

but I felt each rap

from the dancing crowd

reverberate in my breast

as if my own heart

were breaking into sparks

on a white-hot anvil.

There was only one dancer

who truly mesmerised me –

an aristocratically pale

young girl

caught in the rip of the music

as she dragged one foot behind her

in a misshapen boot.

I stayed

until dark

when the music stopped

and the dancers

slipped away.

I live my life

to live these moments

like living in waiting

for the smell

the uncanny smell

of the star-scorched flank

of the horsehead nebula

as she rises

in a stampede of hot music

from my boot-dragging dark.

WATERVIEW STREET

In the street

of my childhood

nothing is reliable.

My parents' friends are dead.

Their children gone.

Familiar houses

are dissolving.

I'd welcome the macabre

solid comfort

of cemeteries and weeds

but instead

there is a tropical

rotting splendour

that disturbs and distracts

like an invisible cockatoo

shrieking from a tree.

Time is melting

everything I remember

into a soft silt

shifting under the mud-mangrove

smell of the bay.

While I wait

for the eternally salty water

to unanchor all my memories

and sweep my old self away.

NEANDERTHALS

There's a deep warm cave

inside of us

where a last remnant

of Neanderthals

still lives

this is not an elegy

nor has deluded nostalgia

won another day

they were always repulsive

to us

and we were poison

to them

but we never wanted them

utterly gone

not before they told us

who they were

and why they knew

the dead must be blessed

we disturbed them

with their hands red

not from a bloody run-in

with a giant bear or each other