RETURNING TO THE LAND OF THE DEAD
for Eileen Mary Warburton Biggs
>
I daub my face and arms with vodka –
an old gardener’s trick, so mosquitos
leave off their blood-fest. Balanced
on a tap of touch and turn, against
the hand-cranked grinding wheel,
the slash-hook whets for the cut.
>
Along the foreshore, an August breeze
plays water music, tender, through
each reed. I swing and find my rhythm,
and as the thicket of brambles unpuzzle,
what was once hidden is now in sight.
I feel the first stings on my eyelids,
>
my lips, my hands. I tug at my shirt –
wasps cling to my breasts, back, belly.
Before the lake closes above me, I see
the nest –a parchment ball sliced
to reveal deep chambers, its darkest
secrets. I swim through the gloom –
>
disturb a pike perfecting toothy menace,
follow launching rails for Vanya
to the end of the pier, where I break
surface a century earlier. As aspens brustle
and grebe calls bump the quiet,
I test my voice and it returns an echo,
>
sounding time’s inevitability.
This vintage summer wears long
linen skirts and high lace collars,
but is not naïve, indifferent or plain.
In the orchard I stand beneath a fruit tree,
breathe a familiar fermenting scent,
>
watch five drunken wasps devour a plum,
tear at its bruised and broken flesh –
in greed lies savagery. One wasp hovers
at eye level, daring me to flinch,
but recognizing a fighter, and my stone-cold
intention should it strike, it returns to its feasting.
>
I feel your eyes on me, Eileen, know you
have seen me before and are not afraid.
Time exists in a loop here, where past
and future are open corridors. You wait
by the door to the rose garden, your face
in shadow under your straw hat, but I see
>
how you smile at my dishevelled ghost –
a scrap of endurance newly emerged
from the lake. There is no warning
I can signal, for already you are lost,
terror already visited, but having found
you here, I will bring something of you back.
.
>
SELF-PORTRAIT IN A HONEYBEE’S EYE
>
In the version my mother tells,
one hung in the still air, hummed
above my crib, its saddlebags
yellow laden. She shooed it,
she says, but not before
it tasted my lip. And that is why,
my mother says, I am chosen
to wheedle with words.
>
I recall its curved fur, and my infant
reflection repeated in its compound
eyes, how it hung in the air, still,
above me. And when it landed,
the secrets that tumbled from its
saddlebag drove into my lip,
and that is why I speak messages
from the otherworld to this.
>
It is why, when in my honeybee coat
you cannot know me, but grasp the sting
deep inside me may eventually kill me.
And as I tremble from flower to disguise,
lost in a copse of words, I hum who I am.
>
>
HIVE
after Les Murray
>
I am the hive
that broods and yields,
I am the dance
of honey and nectar,
I am an apiary,
a colony in disorder–
spring dwindle
and autumn collapse.
I am the hum
from moulded mud,
a nest on high
ground near rain.
I am storm clouds
that climb the air,
that anvil
and strike,
and strike
the troposphere.
I am storm clouds
that burst
and spill un-goodly
psalms–
of end time,
of bees and keepers.
When neonics
grip bees
in a deadly waltz,
and pledge
to money
our share
of the crop –
gain is already decline,
is declension,
is descent and decay.
I am earth nurse
and centre–
the colony
that swarms and leaves,
a flight of honey and nectar.
>
>
from TRACES
v
particle
>
With neither a window nor door
to admit particles of light,
this darkened room
has a gargoyle
shadowing the cornice,
and when the room tilts,
you fall past one another,
changing places.
You call out to any who
might hear – I am here
I am still here, praying the old prayers.