Bees Eat Time
By Gareth Jenkins
The first week is the rush of students
arriving early, roses overlooking locked spaces.
Jo and her poem about beats writing.
the library looks like a library,
doors are stencilled:
Archives I read Anchovies
No Entry No Entry
The second week is Jo’s poem about dogs in green
pyjamas,
about kicking them when they’re down.
Twin bells are wrapped in strung out sheets, bees eat time.
A pitched cliff implodes in dark window holes.
Clustered antennas chatter in a vibrating dawn.
Satellite dishes listen for a group poem.
Week three sees a ladder leaking lights into shadowed
rivers flowing into dark
rungs chained to the wall, clutching her hand on his arm
heads folded in cobbled intimacy. Stones heavy with
the moment after.
week four dreams: Instead of following her lion I am
pursued by one.
Standing in an art gallery in The Rocks,
I look past photos
taken through
old molded glass –
see a lion’s silhouette
out on the street.
Week five is music.
Green monks singing with open mouths,
tongues black from the coal-fired freeway.
Strings and animal skins, fingers floating
through lit channels of tambourine light.
A static TV: atonal Cage column,
the hiving of bee’s digesting time.
An announcement roars like lion’s breath in a breeze of furnace
touching me ferocious with piano voices lifting to
crescendo
in this air-raid morning
full of wings wet with silver water,
feathered castanets
catching at light from the waiting Outside.