The Bee Hut Read Free

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