"My mistress' eyes are nothing…"
A March morning, I last saw her,
Jade in her eyes,
Mossy fingered stare,
As she tiptoed through my garden.
And her long veil draped her silhouette,
Leaving traces among the kale,
Her lips, the red of their veins,
Her breath, their gathered tears.
I welcomed her home and watched.
From my kitchen window, I saw her,
The flash of steel blinding,
Hitting the sun’s face upon her blade
As she split the day.
The sun and wind, whistles and screams.
The engine roar of passing planes muted by vast, absorbent sky and grass,
dirt and plastic.
Baby chuckles and exasperated sighs,
“Oh God” and the like,
reactions to the terror of play,
a mother’s fear,
a father’s glory.
And the ice cream jingle floats atop the astro-turf swelter,
a complementary note to children at work.
The song sings of promises and earned rewards:
ice pop, pat on the back, handshake and a wink,
and maybe a letter, informing
“We accept your excellence this day,
this very warm, breezy winter day on the playground of risk and fortune.”
The way we make heads spin, yours and mine,
gyro-scopic, demonically bone-mind entwined,
two dizzy dabblers in the kind and physical arts,
like the moon-lit chase one night in central park,
sleeved knife steel shiver your pace emboldening,
as I dodged trees and cats, tree’d cat spit-hissing
like mongrel mad dogs, mad-dashing as we were
half naked, stumbling drunk, gamboling jig curs;
where that night ended and this afternoon began,
I cannot unwind the tale, follow the threads’ end,
twist-tied in silent slept breath now we’ve become,
once more, one more lie, one last undoing, un-done.
I Tell The Bees
He left for good in the early hours with just
one book, held tight in his left hand:
The Cyclopedia of Everything
Pertaining
to the Care Of the Honey-Bee; Bees, Hives,
Honey, Implements, Honey-Plants, Etc.
And I begrudged him every single et cetera,
every honey-strainer and cucumber blossom,
every bee-wing and flown year and dead eye.
I went outside when the sun rose, whistling
to call out them as I walked towards the hive.
I pressed my cheek against the wood, opened
my synapses to bee hum, I could smell bee hum.
‘It’s over, honies,’ I whispered, ‘and now you’re mine.’
The Threshold
I waited all day for tears and wanted them, but
there weren’t tears. I touched my lashes and
the eyewater was not water but wing and fur
and I was weeping bees. Bees on my face,
in my hair. Bees walking in and out of my
ears. Workers landed on my tongue
and danced their bee dance as their sisters
crowded round for the knowledge. I learned
the language too, those zig-zags, runs and circles,
the whole damned waggle dance catalogue.
So nuanced it is, the geography of nectar,
the astronomy of pollen. Believe me,
through my mouth dusted yellow
with their pollen, I spoke bees, I breathed bees.
The Hive
The colony grew in my body all that summer.
The gaps between my bones filled
with honeycomb and my chest
vibrated and hummed. I knew
the brood was healthy, because
the pheromones sang through the hive
and the queen laid a good
two thousand eggs a day.
I smelled of bee bread and royal jelly,
my nails shone with propolis.
I spent my days freeing bees from my hair,
and planting clover and bee sage and
woundwort and teasel and borage.
I was a queendom unto myself.
Going About With The Bees
I walked to the city carrying the hive inside me.
The bees resonated my ribs: by now
my mouth was wax, my mouth was honey.
Passers-by with briefcases and laptops
stared as bees flew out of my eyes and ears.
As I stepped into the bank the hum
increased in my chest and I could tell the bees
meant business. The workers flew out
into the cool hall, rested on marble counters,
waved their antennae over paper and leather.
‘Lord direct us.’ I murmured, then felt
the queen turn somewhere near my heart,
and we all watched, two eyes and five eyes,
we all watched the money dissolve like wax.
CCD
My body broke when the bees left,
became a thing of bones
and spaces and stretched skin.
I’d barely noticed
the time of wing twitch
and pheromone mismatch
and brood sealed in with wax.
The honeycomb they
left behind dissolved
into blood and water.
Now I smell of sweat and breath
and I think my body cells
may have turned hexagonal,
though the bees are long gone.
The Sting
When the wild queen leads the swarm
into the room, don’t shut the door on them,
don’t leave them crawling the walls, furniture
and books, a decor of moving fuzz. Don’t go off
to the city, alone, to work, to travel underground.
The sting is no more apis mellifera, is a life
without honey bees, without an earful of buzz
an eyeful of yellow. The sting is no twin
waving antennae breaking through
the cap of a hatching bee’s cell. The sting
is no more feral hive humming in the stone
wall of the house, no smell of honey
as you brush by. No bees will follow, not one,
and there lies the sting. The sting is no sting.
About this poem
First published in 2011.
Jo Shapcott
Jo Shapcott won the National Poetry Competition in 1985 and 1991. Her collections include: Electroplating the Baby(1988), which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, Phrase Book (1992), and My Life Asleep (1998), which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection). Her Book: Poems 1988-1998 (2000), consists of a selection of poetry from her three earlier collections. Her latest book of poems, Of Mutability, (Faber, 2010) was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize and won the Costa Prize for Book of the Year. She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2011 forOf Mutability. She is also co-editor (with Linda Anderson) of a collection of essays about Elizabeth Bishop and co-editor with Matthew Sweeney of an anthology of contemporary poetry, Emergency Kit. She teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
…Monsanto’s contribution to the vanishing bee population is detailed. From genetically altered corn, Monsanto produced an insecticide called Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which once ingested by bees, Bt binds to receptors within the bee’s stomach lining that keeps the bee from eating. Of course this weakens the bee, causing the breakdown of the inner stomach wall, which in turn makes the bee susceptible to spores and bacteria. To further compound the problem, for years the lobbying power of the chemical giant denied causing damage to the bee’s internal immune capacity for resistance to parasites, which of course only continued to kill off the bee population worldwide. Thus, continued chemical use, especially in America, only exacerbates this growing problem.
Global Research, March 07, 2016
A moniker for good living,
this fear of discomfort,
ever drifting toward ever-comfort,
called contentment.
Just give me this or that–
this president,
this career,
this amount of money,
this family,
lover,
mother,
neighborhood–
and everything will sail,
Cadillac shocks across
the fresh asphalt forest floor.
If I can be comfortable,
just end this struggle,
this pain and anguish,
strife,
this ambitious striving,
I will be content.
I once knew this
instinctively.
“Contentment is death,”
I said at solitary 14.
The day I am content,
all juices have dried.
The day I surrender,
turn from struggle,
un-face the tick of the clock,
is the time to lay down,
take peace to a deep hole,
dug in my own backyard,
or in an abandoned dirt lot.
I am neither hero nor warrior.
Just thirsty,
a third rate ecstasy vampire,
seeking small electric bites,
a taste of the powerful,
the blissful,
and the sublime.
To touch the electrified wire
to tolerate the charge,
where it sparks,
risking pain and death,
beats the static hum
sounding the heated surge,
only the pulsing effects,
not the beat itself.
I remember reading the poet:
“I want to write what marks me,
gets me killed.”
I wondered if I did too:
stop fearing, I thought,
stop warning safety,
stop honoring caution
and forego the refrain,
letting shit fly and scatter,
roam and bust,
fling and crust
and curdle like dying,
like spoiled cream,
like decay and wither,
the words, let them
paralyze, plunder and poison,
let them arrest a heart,
gore truth from a bloody lung,
a festering bullet hole to the brain,
let them burn
and gnaw
and lacerate;
let them disrupt dreams
and torture sleep.
Let them brand flesh,
singe hair and spew bile.
Let them upturn content-
meant to pacify and please.
Let them fist screams
and tear at vacant stares.
Let them drown dun breasts
and poetic gentility.
Let them beat the fuck out of you
–and me too.
The components of being build essences of the all told, acted, sung and noted.
They shake out doings done and yet to come like San Andreas’ fault, not a fault.
Did we quake? My shoulders shuddered like a surge, a heart murmur or eruption.
No, the inner mechanics of rebellion taking a stand on all things ingest just arose.
When the ear throbbing starts, I know I’m lost to it, going into floated notice din.
My heartbeat declares so loudly inside my ears in its under water muffle-areum.
I doubt creation’s pen then, my mouth moving silently, my hands ripping at keys.
Keyboard fingers fly like the cocaine toad hopping brain’s clicking away at strings.
There’s this word association that bleeds writing, a lapse, slide gurgle into them:
Strung words, the meaning of which is not revealed until they mix and sit together.
They settle in a rhythm and slur, brushed water tinted smears blotting tilted space.
Poetry and being entwine thus: letter, scene, wish, guess all overlaid in blindness.
Squeezed juice, the nothing of matter becomes me-you, and we polish air’s shine.
We never carry them the way they carry us, but we carry, we do.
I may never lift my father in my arms and cradle him to sleep–
but I would if that were the only thing to do, if he withered away,
the blood in his urine signaling cancer gone cure-less, and all
of his 6’3″body shrunk to size befitting my strength’s capacity.
His burden was not the same as mine now, yet just as heavy.
I make his doctor appointments, petition his insurance carrier
for returns and permissions, for money owed and paid, due
promises others should keep, I track them and bite my nails
when he drives, counting the days til the inevitable unknown.
I am his memory and his nattering nit-picking conscience.
Parenting him is not like his parenting me–not like it at all.
He left parenting to his wife, my mother, who stares skeletal now.
My parenting is ironic, the young to the old, whereas his or hers
was right side up. Picking up my body in his arms to rush me,
bleeding, to the doctor downstairs when I cut my finger off in the
city apartment steel shut booming door I teased with my 3 year old
fingers til it bit my left forefinger, my pointer, right off my hand,
he carried me, but not like I carry him, in his arms, not in my arms,
but in my constant vigilance and resentment and worry and fear.
I watch him and struggle to be patient, to be nice, to be a daughter
not a mother or a wife or stranger disinterested in the outcome,
though that may be how it appears on the outside, estrangement.
But it’s never-without-burning back of the mind bearing weight,
loaded on a mind’s shoulders, sagged under heavy-careful love.
He held me in lightness and faith, worry, worship and wonder.
I speak him in my dreams, awakening to his anger and my own.
Shaking off our bodies to the dust is always on our minds, we two–
a father to a daughter-mother-mortal-stranger til the end, ours.
Hold hands in equanimity,
knuckles to knee, soft palm up,
elbows east and west to the sea,
or thumbs poised right angle to
index, cupping the joint round.
Lotus springs from the dead
but loving breath warms limb,
left foot rising over right over
left again, balance in the being
synced forth in a becoming to
the rhythmic beam’s third eye.
Hold hands, heart with mind,
hear the calm of 10,000 years
in lungfuls of uncharted time.
The hours waiting…
waiting on the bench
cement and puke mold
bench, after finger-ink-
smudge-shove-printing,
while I witnessed her,
shoe-less, bra-less,
patch-toothy grin like sin,
cheap dye and tat job,
resisting and they, bitch
cops, pushers, shovers,
kicking the shit out of her,
who was out of her mind,
uncontrolled, and they,
shit-bitch-dep-pukies,
clubs and punches, her
forced with her head
shoved down by gloved
fists, face between her
legs, until subdued,
no breath, so violent, so
much violence, shouting,
berating, beating, negating,
every bit of it, all of it,
dystopian, institutional,
blues and grays, painted
cement walls, filthy dinge
cages and cages, and the
continual influx of human
fodder, walking lines, room
to room, to room to room,
walking lines, room walking
lines, walking–no room
for poor players out, no
way out, no way, not for the
poor paying prison prices.
credit: ktla.org
In the gaze of the other 