Three poems

Consolations 40

The house is surrounded by dead

and dying bees; there are almost

no birds to reject this offering

of collapse. Bee stings are intact,

and dead bees are lighter than breath.

Hive imploding or attacked. This is an issue

 

outside the sun’s remit – it remains

buried in cloud. I fear someone has poisoned

a hive, but it could be an internal crisis.

Some bees are set up ready to fly, keeping

their death/afterlife dynamic in play.

It’s terrifying to describe them as “drones”.

 

How much room would Boethius have

to process this in his cage, awaiting             

           execution.

The European honeybee unable to reach         

         flowers.

A double flock of corellas flies over and their         

         wings

stroke bee-wing membranes, shaking veined         

         contour lines.

Cullers would shoot corellas out of the sky,         

         loathing origins.

I can find no consolation for loss in Haydn’s

“The Creation” at this juncture. Nor in the way

any colony is built and falls. I pass each bee,         

         listening

for the whisper of its true name. To live and die

together to serve someone else’s propaganda.

If the dying is not beautiful, nor is the death.

 

 

Consolations 31

When I lived on the edge of the plain

tucked up against The Scarp, an orchard

on the northern bank of the thin river

was my point of repair. The orchardist

lived in a shed among his equipment

and chemicals, his clothes drying

 

on his tractor. He ignored my alcoholism

and played Philosophy to my negativity,

though his answers were always defeatist.

His son wanted to sell the property

to housing estate developers. He told

me of his childhood and youth in Dalmatia.

 

He told me of his wife and of wanderer         

         butterflies.

I’ve just found a draft written as part of         

         a sequence

of “orchardist poems” in a notebook dated         

         1989.

I type it up. The orchard was primarily

oranges and mandarins, but he also

nurtured “green eye” figs. Most often

 

he talked about the nature of “evil

in the world”. Vulnerable on his own,

young men would raid the orchard, destroy

for the sake of destruction. Kids, on the other

hand, only stole fruit, which he could cope with.

The sun never rose in conjunction with his         

         oranges

 

but had a malign purpose. The orchard

was its own damage but not as damaging

as the mode of deleting it. That was his         

        thinking.

And mine, though I would never be at war         

        with silvereyes

while also loving scarlet robins. I love both. He         

        couldn’t.

There was no advice I could give, working out         

       of chaos.

 

 

Limbo Canto 22

 

It’s no less busy here

for not being a town,

and I free parrots

 

from Joseph Cornell boxes

and draw bullets to my

voided body armour.

 

The old bloke with his

hay rake behind the forty-

year old tractor

 

is thinking about corellas

in a way I wish he wouldn’t.

He is passing by on the road

 

curving above the house.

I barely dare to nickname him

Juan Gris, and his tractor

 

has no cabin and a can

bobbing over the smudgy

exhaust. Having reacted

so badly to the inoculation,

I clear out the archives under

my skin of all newsprint —

 

they will stay empty

until I am boxed in myself

or dispersed as ash

 

around the penumbra

of the valley. Poignant

as evasions, abstract

 

as ley lines, and complicit

with protocols and/or surveys,

        I montage seedfall

       with “ephemera”.