The Bee Hut Page 3

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?

  SMELLING TIGERS

  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

  we disturbed them

  with their hands ochre-red

  preparing their dead

  bigger and shiny-skinned

  we yowled, threw smart stones

  and gnawed their marrow-rich

  inferior bones

  we did dreadful things

  we learnt nothing from them.

  * * *

  What was I trying to learn

  whose bones was I gnawing

  as I sat last week

  on the bottom steps

  of my old friend’s

  empty rotting mourning

  house

  crumbling down into the water

  of my childhood’s ancient mangroves?

  I rocked on the salty tide

  of the oyster-rimmed bay

  alive and ageing and sad.

  And I waited

  for one of the Old Hairies

  to brave the long hard climb

  out

  and teach me how

  to rest my dead

  and keep burning.

  VAMPIRE

  Each new ghost in my life

  living and dead

  smells of mulch

  a compost growing

  rich and strange

  sometimes attracting

  a lyrebird

  that rifles through it

  singing like a chainsaw

  through its punctured neck

  THE WATTLE BIRD

  Until this morning

  I’ve been woken up

  by a red wattle bird

  flinging himself

  at the glass

  of my half-open window

  calling throatily

  with raucous cheek

  as he prances the wood

  of my balcony rail

  I’m old enough

  to be flattered

  and take no courting attention

  for granted

  this grey morning

  I fumble awake

  groggily trailing

  cobwebs of a dream

  about my long dead

  still adored Siamese

  clutching her to my frantic

  dream self

  as if she were, miracle,

  still alive

  this dry morning

  of a slippery rainless winter

  I sip my strong coffee

  and listlessly watch

  the window

  longing for the joyous noise

  of my new, if just

  rattling through,

  boyfriend. />
  EARLY MORNING BALLOONS OVER MELBOURNE

  Unearthly in the chill blue

  they hang silent, coldly lovely

  until there’s that lurching

  belch of gas fire

  and suddenly

  they’re everything I’m afraid of –

  heights, ice, other people in rocking space,

  my own helpless helpless

  fragility.

  Why, when I dream of danger,

  can I never just reach out

  and grab

  the rising feet

  of a phoenix?

  THE FOREIGN FOREST

  You burn your bridges

  going into a foreign forest

  like a gleaming cruel

  new school

  where you don’t know

  the bluffing bullies

  from the silent cougars.

  You learn from experience

  going into a foreign forest

  where cold pine needles