Heliotrope, and: A Deserted House

Heliotrope

Past beautiful,
stuck in the dust

of a road, her thin
branched head

with its baby hair
and dozen white eyes

so anthropomorphized
and mute—her lover

going down the sky
daily in his flaming steps

and she with her
padlocked gaze—

eternal follower!
Yet the circle's story

fixes her
at its centre—

her greenish rooted
limbs keep company

with all the buried
girls and boys

whose lost testes
and ovules stir to life

again this month—
under the soft rain

of a god's grief
the hyacinth and lotus

come, with narcissus
on his sex-struck stem.

A Deserted House

What but design of darkness to appall?

It was the noise in the chimney that reminded me of it, less a buzzing than that deep boom the sea makes in a cavern, the noise of an underground process, a concussion.

I thought of the bee colonies in the mansion house chimney. In the absence of fires set by roughened hands, in that sulphurous and cobwebby shaft, pierced by a rod of light each noon, the waxen cells are painstakingly constructed.

It is the tiredest of metaphors, this six-sided suburb, but what perturbs us now is the logic of its order, like something our production-line minds might concoct, one grub to each cell invariably, incarcerated hatchlings.

Day on day the noise of industry grows in the chimney, afflicting the whole house with tinnitus.

Still the dust motes drift through the curtained rooms, Cupid on his pedestal smiles slyly through his scarf of transparent marble, and as usual no wicks are lit in the Fascinating Lamp Room.

There is just a noise like the sea gnawing at the distant edge of England, gaining a yard or so each year. What made him go, the Seigneur of Holderness, who was steadfast through religious trouble, who understood the meaning of wars?

He vanished, leaving his vintage cellar and ouija board, his riding crop on the hall table. He vanished, and the skeletal whale outside the ha-ha fell to pieces, jangling its mammoth bones.

In the chimney of his house the noise grows. The bees will continue to build, varnishing their hexagons with propolis for the city's defence. Who now, on hearing that rumour, would infer: less a haunted house than a population in the chimney piece?