The Bee Hut Page 2

  the stones stood.

  I can’t remember how long

  we stayed.

  We danced around the stones

  and took photos.

  I still remember

  the thin tune playing

  in my charmed head.

  On the ferry back to Holyhead

  my bare wrist pinged

  where my silver bracelet used to be.

  Was it just something superstitious

  young Yeats said

  that made me believe

  the fairies had taken

  the silver bracelet

  instead of me?

  THE HOUSE

  Is this what middle age

  does to the imagination,

  setting up haunted

  house

  in every idling cranny?

  It’s time I sent

  my own premature ghost

  scarpering

  to a cobwebbed nunnery.

  AFTER BRUEGEL

  Let me join the frilled and flying

  damned

  and live vivid

  as a wet dog.

  THREE SONNETS

  I . IS IT NOT THE THING?

  After Byron

  Trying to get a gutless friend

  to get it

  Byron wrote

  Is it not life, is it not the thing?

  He was praising the bawdy

  spurt

  of his own poem, his own

  ballsy Don Juan.

  Every poet wants to write the poem

  that penetrates

  with the ice-cold shock

  of the Devil’s prick.

  The poem that will fuck you awake

  or kill you.

  II. WHAT A PLUNGE!

  After Woolf

  This morning the street

  stings

  like salt in a happily healing

  wound.

  A memory breaks under

  your ribs

  and plunges you

  in turbulent sweet water.

  Life is so dangerous,

  but this morning you can take

  the wave

  right to the sparkling shore.

  You can bear knowing

  the street will one day dump you.

  III. BEAUTIFULLY BONKERS

  After Blake

  Blake’s burning Bow

  turns and turns

  in your inadequate trembling

  hands.

  What holy war

  are you trembling for?

  What purging dazzling madness

  are you raising?

  You squirm in paradox.

  Hell today.

  Paradise tomorrow.

  It’s all bliss and grist.

  Or is it just those Arrows of Desire

  spiking your drink again?

  BLUEBOTTLES

  In living there is always

  the terror

  of being stung

  of something

  coming for you

  on the unavoidable wave.

  In living there is always

  the terror

  of the alien boneless

  thing

  of something

  blue

  coming for you

  from the blue and salty sea

  spat

  on your bare and shrinking

  skin.

  In living there is always

  the terror

  of the poison finding

  your heart

  of something

  whose stingers

  will stretch over you

  like stars

  with an ancient burning

  patience.

  THINGS

  I.M. Ruth Tedeschi

  Wafting

  half hallucinating with brain fatigue

  through Berlin’s massive

  Pergamon Museum

  I think

  how strange. how sobering.

  that our things outlive us.

  Whether it’s the gleaming

  loot

  of gold jewellery

  and silver plate

  or the splash

  of vivid, intimate

  usefulness

  in the broken

  ceramic jug.

  Things

  outlive our sweetest

  most durable friends

  things

  stolidly, persistently

  outlive our wildest

  loves

  where we fling ourselves

  into the heart

  of the black spitting fire

  and declare

  we’ll live here

  forever.

  We bury our friends

  we sink in their clay and weep.

  We walk –

  in time –

  dripping wet

  with remorseless

  common sense

  out of love’s fabulising flame.

  It’s just our things

  that survive

  dissolving in the end

  even the most sticky

  of our clutching

  smudges.

  POEMS: JANUARY–AUGUST 2004

  For Andy with love

  THE NINTH HOUR

  The ninth hour

  is here

  The ninth hour

  makes no sense

  The ninth hour

  rises up wearily

  in a freezing mist.

  I have come to a river

  of blood and vinegar

  I have come to a river

  where only pain

  keeps its feet

  I have come to a bridge

  of dissolving bone

  I have come to a place

  of burning cold

  I am trapped in a space

  deformed

  by my own

  leprous fear

  have I the strength

  to pay suffering its due?

  * * *

  There is a calm

  that is no cousin

  to courage

  There is a calm

  that sits

  like a quivering ape

  under the python’s

  hypnotising eye.

  Everything makes you

  shiver

  The hot wind. The rank river.

  The poisonous euphoria.

  But it’s your shrivelling

  flesh

  that has the whip hand

  Your flesh

  has its own tumorous

  will

  You may think

  you have been here

  before

  You may think

  your quicksilver spirit

  has your furtive flesh

  licked

  But darkness

  is stronger

  than light

  The flesh knows best

  who’ll win line honours

  in this fight

  * * *

  The ninth hour

  is here

  The ninth hour

  makes no sense

  Don’t pray

  for a flash flood

  delivering miracle

  or clarity

  During the ninth hour

  reason dies of thirst

  Your blood stagnates

  stale

  as a base metal

  in your mouth

  You dangle

  in a cacophony

  of retching noise

  with no grandiose riffs

  of heroism

  You will never forget

  the foul sound

  of the ninth hour.

  * * *

  I have come to a river

  of blood and vinegar

  I am here,

  ninth hour,

  I am here

  stripped and shivering.

  But listen, ninth hour,

  listen

 
and pay heed

  to a new sound

  in me

  I am not here

  silent and alone

  Do you hear

  the fighting hiss

  of this geyser

  in me?

  I stand my ground

  in the undaunted spray

  and company

  of my own words.

  NUMBERS

  I get magic

  (sometimes I get more

  than I bargain for)

  but I don’t get

  numbers.

  Numbers do worse

  than humiliate

  or elude me

  they don’t add up.

  I am no algebra tart

  ravished

  by the meretricious music

  of the spheres.

  My eyes and nose

  never streamed

  with incontinent ecstasy

  through geometry classes

  as my disastrous triangles

  collapsed in a cacophony

  around me.

  Perhaps it’s a failing

  to grasp

  or even want

  the utterly perfect number

  burning through my retina

  like the utterly perfect morning.

  Instead I peer

  with nauseating vertigo

  into the deep dark pitch

  of numbers

  like an exhausted mammoth

  dangerously tottering

  on the edge

  of a bottomless mystery.

  THE HAMPSTEAD HEATH TOAD

  For Roger Deakin

  It was one of those

  beautiful

  English summer nights.

  The lilac shimmer of silent

  lakes.

  The whisper of ghost fox

  through your heartbeat.

  But the toad in the hand

  stank real.

  Stank through his palpitating

  skin.

  Stank of fear.

  Is the fabled hallucinogenic

  touch of toads

  just as Macbeth

  witnessed

  a hypnotising snare

  of toxic apparition?

  What thrilling doors of perception

  open

  to the musky ooze

  of panting paralysed

  terror?

  Of course

  intoxicated on moonshine

  you wanted

  and will always want

  the toad

  to calm down

  smell sweet

  and give up his phantasmagorical

  secrets

  generously.

  But the toad in the hand

  protected himself.

  The toad in the hand

  stank real.

  CHARLES BAUDELAIRE’S GRAVE

  How do you bury a poet?

  Surely not

  how they buried Baudelaire

  thrown in with his parents

  like an infant death.

  It stretches

  to a ghastly irony

  Pasternak’s remark

  that poets should remain

  children.

  Do poets really want to trade

  the lingering savour

  of experience

  for guileless eyes?

  There’s something

  repulsive

  about an empty fresh

  adult face.

  Such baby faces

  can be seen in uniform

  or with a foot

  on a slaughtered tiger.

  They can be capable

  of anything

  or a long lullaby

  of nothing.

  I want to exhume Baudelaire

  and give him his own

  magnificent mercurial vault.

  From one angle

  an arching ebony cat.

  From another

  sneering black marble

  spleen.

  No poet

  dead or alive

  should rot

  with their parents.

  EARLY MORNING AT THE MERCY

  This six a.m. moment

  in the cool-blue cool

  of early morning

  is not eternal.

  It will pass

  like the faint bat squeak

  of an early bird call.

  It is silent again

  even as the dark

  fades

  and the white eyes of buildings

  emerge

  slowly gleaming

  as they drop their grey veils.

  But now the birds

  are getting serious.

  More and brassier

  calls

  as my first cup of tea

  chills.

  And I turn back

  to Gwen’s poetry

  wondering

  how on earth she could write

  so eloquently in hospital.

  Her spirit

  must have been

  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
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br />   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