The Bee Hut Read Free Page B

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    for withdrawn old age.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