Three Poems

A Bee-Keeper's Anger

He'd gone out angry. When
he did not return that evening
nor the next, we searched-
the police, the neighbours,
I went all over the farm,
the bush, the broken creek.
Nothing. On the third day
his bees swarmed and gathered
in a mass on the verandah
near our bedroom window.
I did not like it. But they left
the day he was declared
missing, a fluid shadow
streaming through autumn light.

Three years. Anger does not
help the letting go, the wondering.
Summer came, hot and close-
time enough, I thought
one day, I'll go up for a swim.
We'd used to skinny-dip
beneath a hidden waterfall
up in the gully, hard to get to
but so often worth it in those
better days when he would
stretch me out across
the mossy bank, our skins
live and warm with sunlight
and desire, tingling from
the icy water and anticipation.

How we'd missed it, who
can say? The skeleton was stuck
into a crevice, hovered over
by the spray of ferns, but
the skull had sometime
broken free, and rolled down
on to the bank. It lay there
gaping at me, still accusing-
and when I heard the sound
my first thought was
he hasn't gotten over it.
Then the bees poured out
of his eye sockets straight at me.

---

The Rakaia River Mouth

with its tongue today held back
the sea-sound sucks hollow
back and forth / back and forth

the sea heaves upon the beach
beating at the shingle berm
k-ksh / sh-sh-sh / h-h-sh

driftwood / kelp / seawrack
of recent storms / the stench
a scavenged carcass of a shark

a fisherman baits his hooks
the gulls / sea-light clamouring
about him as he casts again

sun / sea / sky / stones
the wind hones a switchblade
knife / the shifting weather

and an acrid smell of lightning
from the cumulus above
lines of roaring macrocarpas

with the turning tide the river
lets go its whole brown length
into the belly of the sea

we are seeing all this happen
elsewhere an undisturbed
blue and violet light of distance

---

Coastal Hostesses

It is a sea-port after all. En route
a stink of Russian sailors on the bus
is the precurser. Then the hum
and chunter of ship's generators
through the night. The girls,
getting on a bit yet free and easy
warm the welcome. Nothing
is more generous, it seems, than this
purchased flesh, these thighs
that open the urgent tide ...
And weeks at sea are sublimated in
the good time, in the sinking
down below the sea-wrack surface
of the mind, into the depths
of faces unremembered in the dawn;
smeared mascara and the ache
of something deeper than
the muscles and the cellulite,
something like the sinews
anchored in your bones, straining
in the rise and falling of the tide;
this harbour, more than just
some place where boats are moored.