JAMIE McKENDRICK

Apotheosis

His bonce high-domed like a skep, the bee-man
holds forth on how to pick a bee up by its wings
which are strong enough — it stands to reason —
to bear the weight without harm to their hinges.
As though he were a banjo-player and the bee's wings
were a two-ply, fine abalone plectrum,
he demonstrates with a bumblebee on the windowframe
the exact grip between forefinger and thumb

but slips on the waxed oak floor, his arm outstretched,
neither tightening nor, regardless of his own fate,
loosening his hold on the bee one micro-notch.
I try to break his fall but move too late
for, with a dry hum, he streaks off out of reach
through the open window, still holding forth the bee.

Good Hedges

He wants the holly tree cut down to size,
the holly tree where the birds are sound, and safe
from his cat whose snickering impersonation
of birdsong - more like the din a mincer makes -
fools no-one, and charms nothing out of the trees.

He wants us to tidy up the pyracantha sprouting
its fire-thorns and berry-laden fractals, and clip
the brambles, the lilacs, everything wild.
Next he'll want the hedgehog's spikes filed down,
the moles claws bound up with green twine

— already he's replaced his own hair with ginger nylon.
His light he says is being blocked. It's dark
where he is. He has a point — so many deaths
in these few houses, it's like something
loosed from the bible. One lucky escape, though:

the bearded roofer, one along, who lost
his footing, high on the scaffolding, and fell,
with his deck of tiles, on his shoulder and skull.
Sometimes tears come to his eyes for no reason
he can think of, but now the sun's out he sits again

on the patio, plucking from his banjo
some Appalachian strand of evergreen bluegrass
then an Irish reel where his fingers scale
a glittering ladder like a waterfall
so even the songbirds hush in the holly tree.

Oil and Blood

Sleep on my chosen one it's only me
intent as a Madagascan sloth that moves
through the tall twilight of mahogany,
padding down the wall towards your pillowcase
and the hollows of your neck I ache for.
Lifting one knee, you shape a linen vault
that frees the scent of nard and nightflowers.
Does my dark disturb you, sweetheart, do you dream
of the rooftree burdened by a roost of bats,
your outline inscaped by their squeaky jargon?

Within a tongue's length of your ear lobe,
I could consume whole nights in this vestibule
of paradise if waiting weren't such hell
or if Van Helsing, that bony eunuch,
weren't striding upstairs with his cricket bag
full of sharpened stumps and oil of garlic,
the paraphernalia of intolerance.
Let him come. Rather than leave you be
I'd have the sun impale me and the breeze distress
my mouldy flavoured, still enamoured dust.

Available from Amazon.co.uk:

Ink Stone (Faber, 2003)
Sky Nails: Poems 1979-1997 (Faber, 2000)