Free The Bee Hut by Dorothy Porter Page B

barnacled blue arm
    and throws you
    a Roman coin.
    It isn’t beautiful.
    Neither are you.
    But you pray
    its sea-roughed Emperor
    will somehow benignly
    see you through.
    The gold-melt moon.
    The aroma of gritty six a.m.
    Turkish coffee.
    Harsh warm Hebrew
    pounding the air
    like a confounding family
    squabble.
    The marooned marble column
    on which you dry
    your shabby old towel.
    This glittering port city.
    A sophisticated paradise.
    Where Pontius Pilate thirsted
    for the humanity
    of face-saving lies.
    You are only eighteen.
    But thousands of years
    of brackish Biblical history
    sweep into you
    and catch
    like a thousand sharp
    glass beads.
    Sometimes a new place
    has the ferocity of a gale
    ripping the calm
    off a safe harbour
    making the drowned bells peel
    Hallelujah
    for all your future
    false prophets
    and glorious. glorious.
    lost gods.

BLACKBERRIES
    I can’t shake
    that ghost-town pub
    whistling empty-bottled
    through its black windows,
    and its strangled verandahs
    creaking with a terrifying
    ancient thirst
    under a two-storey coat
    of bristling blackberry.
    Is it taunting me
    with the dancing skeleton
    tune
    of my own life’s mystery
    struggling for rhythm
    and lyrics?
    I hold in my hand
    the greedy, bleeding
    pen
    that has always
    gorged itself.
    The bliss-mouthed
    gluttony miracle –
    that stained Keats
    grape-purple
    that had cynical Byron
    reeling on the ceiling –
    when the plump berries
    sing
    and your pen slashes ahead
    like a pain-hungry prince
    hacking through
    the bramble’s dragon teeth
    to the heart’s most longed-for
    comatose, but ardently ready
    princess.

THE ENCHANTED ASS
    So tender is the Queen of Fairies’
    mouth
    on all your unsleeping parts
    her kiss
    arrives
    like summery moonlight
    her kiss is the mole’s bliss
    the blind
    blinding way
    her green magic breaks in you
    like a warm storm
    you grow
    ears, tail,
    and a hee-hawing
    lightning.

A WALK IN KENSINGTON GARDENS
    Solitude is where writers
    chatter best
    a soothing static –
    the ambulatory, admit it, happy
    ticking over
    like this afternoon
    in the sweet green cold London
    spring
    I watch a tall grey heron
    stomping down its reed nest
    that’s sprouting everywhere
    like garden-sheared hair
    and all my living
    and all my dead
    run up my arms
    like squirrels.

THE SILVER BRACELET
    We were lost.
    The map was a useless tease.
    The afternoon was golden-green
    cold.
    It was old Ireland
    after all.
    Things happened that afternoon.
    The dwarf at the door.
    The strange dirty man on a bike
    with an impossibly narrow face.
    All gave false directions
    to what we were so doggedly dreamily
    looking for.
    We pushed through an old gate
    into a meadow
    dancing with green light.
    And found
    the stone circle
    so clearly, so mundanely
    marked on the map.
    Lichen-tipped, warm
    as if squirming
    with old friendly blood
    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 . I S 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. W HAT A PLUNGE !
    After Woolf
    This morning