The Bee Hut
THE BEE HUT
THE BEE HUT
Dorothy Porter
Published by Black Inc.,
an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd
37–39 Langridge Street
Collingwood Victoria 3066 Australia
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© Dorothy Porter 2009.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the
prior consent of the publishers.
The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Porter, Dorothy Featherstone, 1954–2008.
The bee hut / Dorothy Porter.
ISBN for print edition: 9781863954464
ISBN for eBook edition: 9781921825491
A821.3
Cover design by Thomas Deverall
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
Head of Astarte
The Enchanted Ass
Poems: January–August 2004
Smelling Tigers
Jerusalem
Africa
The Freak Songs
Lucky
FOREWORD
Dorothy Porter never went anywhere without a volume of poetry. Whether to the local coffee shop or to Antarctica, a book of poems, and often several, travelled with her. She counted reading poetry among her greatest pleasures and her greatest blessings.
Her own poetry glows and shimmers with a lifetime of reading and this volume is no exception. All the poems, with the exception of the Freak Songs and a couple of others, were written in the last almost-five years of her life. It was a period of great happiness and satisfaction; the best, according to Dorothy, she had known. She produced a large body of new poetry, including her verse novel El Dorado; there were her collaborations with musicians Jonathan Mills, Paul Grabowsky and Tim Finn, and her work on the film of The Eternity Man, directed by Julien Temple. She was aware of a new depth to the way she inhabited her days, and often spoke about this. Always captivated by the wonder of existence, in the last years of her life Dot learned to live each moment as it occurred, to linger and dwell. She delighted in the everyday: home, family, friends, work, our cat; and she delighted in our travels, vividly represented in this collection, to Africa, Antarctica, the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, London and New York. She acknowledged her good fortune several times each day.
Every few weeks during 2004 when she was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, Dot would spend the weekend with her friend Robert on his farm. She loved the country air, the birds, the quiet, the glimpse of the ocean on the horizon, and she was fascinated by the old hut, not far from the house, which had become home to a colony of bees.
The bee hut became a metaphor for these last years of her life – overwhelmingly healthy years, I should add. She marvelled at the bees, as she had always marvelled at life, but she was also aware of the danger amid the sweetness and beauty.
It was not the same, as she writes in one of the poems here, after she was first diagnosed with cancer. But as these poems show, Dorothy Porter saturated every moment with life right up to the end; her last poem, ‘View from 417’, was written in her hospital room on 26 November 2008, two weeks before she died. In The Bee Hut she has left behind a volume of poetry to travel with us through the days and years ahead.
Andrea Goldsmith
HEAD OF ASTARTE
EGYPT
The most powerful presence
is absence.
When the pyramid dissolves
you will keep
its shadow. its deep rich space.
in you.
Today you are strung,
shivering, with a haunted history.
You are singing dying songs
that hurt. but make you.
Perhaps in Egypt’s death
is your salvation.
Its wailing gods. Its red
heart of desert. Its river
flowing like a stinging
harvest. Cling
and grow you richly.
Bless Egypt.
Bless her passing.
ON READING E.M. FORSTER’S
GUIDE TO ALEXANDRIA
‘The best way of seeing it is to wander aimlessly about.’
—E.M. FORSTER
Imagine a city
where it’s mostly
‘imagine’
imagine a city, the story goes,
where one minute you’re a bride
in your own wedding procession
next minute
the ground coughs and collapses
engulfing and delivering you
dusty and astonished
into the embalmed arms
of Alexander’s equally astonished
lost corpse
lying gilded in a forgotten catacomb
under the traffic fumes.
Imagine a city where closeted
Mummy’s Boy Morgan under Pompey’s Pillar
feasts on erotic love for the first time
now imagine a city
with sexually-healed flâneur Forster
taking your elbow
through the seedy Rues
to light candles, cigarettes and the poet’s best whisky
with Cavafy
imagine afterwards
to wind down from all that smoke, stoicism and intoxicating talk
you do the Greco-Roman Museum
and vulnerable still
you let the tomb terracotta statuettes
do your head in
because Morgan calls them
‘the loveliest things in the museum’
because you’re still unsteady with flesh-lambent poetry
because. because. because.
nothing lasts
not Forster. not Cavafy’s eloquent doomed mediocrities. not you.
Now your aimless, wandering imagination
is shivering with the memory germ’s fever
caught for the rest of your life
from this mercilessly contagious
imaginary city.
PLEASURE
After the Cleopatra exhibition, British Museum
Is it the bite
of a sighing crocodile?
All your voluptuous
bleeding incense
come at once?
I have travelled its Silk Road
with my curtains drawn,
hearing
its lurching mirages
shiver among the stones
and nettles
of its gorgeous desert.
WINE
Scorched through the journey of every slow sip
is the intimate memory
of Calvary.
The sponge dipped
in rough red
at the end of a spear.
That gift
from strangers
before they thoughtfully break your legs.
You must learn from dying gods
and gracefully render to the comfort
of intoxication.
Even the gibbering homicidal troll
under every life’s bridge
can be stalled with a drink.
HEAD OF ASTARTE
Goddess in the London antiquities shop window,
whose starry name once soared,
how can your null and void terracotta head
shore me against my ruin?
I want to steal you from the underworld,
graft you like a juicy cutting of Orpheus
graft you like a seeding amulet
to the stri
ngs of my right hand.
Guide me through this bloody desert
of parching modernity.
Let’s blow down the old straw god
draped in pious brutality.
Instead of adoring you like this
in furtive powerless bliss.
AENEAS REMEMBERS DOMESTIC BLISS
We were never married, Dido.
Cease weeping, let me leave and agree
we both knew real spouses.
Even as the ghost of my precious wife passed
through my clutching arms like mist
I swear on my soul I could taste her.
O the scorch of lost Trojan mornings
in our rumpled bed with bread, figs
and, yes, honey!
I could taste honey
as if every bee in Troy
had made her phantom its swarming hive.
Of course I will miss you.
But release us both from this futile tar-pit
and accept we were never married
yes, my divided heart rears for you
mourning already the smell of your flushed skin
and the sting of your green fire eyes
but we were never married
and your ghost – such threats! –
will keep its roost and never come
looking for me through
my next awful war, next sacked city
to flood my drought mouth in honey – or poison.
We were never married, Dido.
Believe me, I’m sad too that you can’t
sweeten me and I can’t comfort you.
THE LOVELY NIGHT. THE ROTTING SHIP
After Yannis Ritsos
The night they brought the aged Argo
back to Corinth.
Torches. The procession
through the nocturnal whispers
of spring flowers.
The lovely night. The rotting ship.
An owl hoots
across the derelict deck
across the hallowed place
(eaten through. rowlock lost)
where Orpheus sat and sang.
The temple. The priests chanting
to miraculous memories.
The sleek young men dance
with the hairless grace
of mincing boys
who’ve never raised an oar
or a sweat.
An old sailor’s rusty remembering
back
squeaks like a baleful bat.
He spits at the ground.
Then moves off
to piss behind
a black tree.
WALKING ON WATER
From one memory
the murk clears –
the nettles and rubbish
and low tide stench
of the Sea of Galilee
bathed in powdery glare
then glimpsed on a balcony
in a derelict building
a grubby solitary monk –
was he drunk or demented?
At eighteen
I made these judgements wildly
with a wincing lack
of charity –
but I remember clearly
the monk clattering about
in a suspicious mess
of empty bottles.
I was already at the alluring
beginning
of giving up religion
for a solemn and selfish
sense
of my own vocation –
I was glad to leave
the monk behind me.
I knew. I believed
ahead somewhere
in that white smelly morning
was the rippling shadow
of a fresh young god –
walking on water.
CAESAREA
The Mediterranean lifts
its barnacled blue arm
and throws you
a Roman coin.
It isn’t beautiful.
Neither are you.
But you pray
its sea-roughed Emperor
will somehow benignly
see you through.
The gold-melt moon.
The aroma of gritty six a.m.
Turkish coffee.
Harsh warm Hebrew
pounding the air
like a confounding family
squabble.
The marooned marble column
on which you dry
your shabby old towel.
This glittering port city.
A sophisticated paradise.
Where Pontius Pilate thirsted
for the humanity
of face-saving lies.
You are only eighteen.
But thousands of years
of brackish Biblical history
sweep into you
and catch
like a thousand sharp
glass beads.
Sometimes a new place
has the ferocity of a gale
ripping the calm
off a safe harbour
making the drowned bells peel
Hallelujah
for all your future
false prophets
and glorious. glorious.
lost gods.
THE ENCHANTED ASS
BLACKBERRIES
I can’t shake
that ghost-town pub
whistling empty-bottled
through its black windows,
and its strangled verandahs
creaking with a terrifying
ancient thirst
under a two-storey coat
of bristling blackberry.
Is it taunting me
with the dancing skeleton
tune
of my own life’s mystery
struggling for rhythm
and lyrics?
I hold in my hand
the greedy, bleeding
pen
that has always
gorged itself.
The bliss-mouthed
gluttony miracle –
that stained Keats
grape-purple
that had cynical Byron
reeling on the ceiling –
when the plump berries
sing
and your pen slashes ahead
like a pain-hungry prince
hacking through
the bramble’s dragon teeth
to the heart’s most longed-for
comatose, but ardently ready
princess.
THE ENCHANTED ASS
So tender is the Queen of Fairies’
mouth
on all your unsleeping parts
her kiss
arrives
like summery moonlight
her kiss is the mole’s bliss
the blind
blinding way
her green magic breaks in you
like a warm storm
you grow
ears, tail,
and a hee-hawing
lightning.
A WALK IN KENSINGTON GARDENS
Solitude is where writers
chatter best
a soothing static –
the ambulatory, admit it, happy
ticking over
like this afternoon
in the sweet green cold London
spring
I watch a tall grey heron
stomping down its reed nest
that’s sprouting everywhere
like garden-sheared hair
and all my living
and all my dead
run up my arms
like squirrels.
THE SILVER BRACELET
We were lost.
The map was a useless tease.
The afternoon was golden-green
cold.
It was old Ireland
after all.
Things happened that afternoon.
The dwarf at the door.
The strange dirty man on a bike
with an impossibly narrow face.
All gave false directions
to what we were so doggedly dreamily
looking for.
We pushed through an old gate
into a meadow
dancing with green light.
And found
the stone circle
so clearly, so mundanely
marked on the map.
Lichen-tipped, warm
as if squirming
with old friendly blood