Poems

= Dorothy's early influences and favourites =

 =  Alfred, Lord Tennyson   =  **Break, Break, Break** Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy, That he shouts with his sister at play! O, well for the sailor lad, That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.

= John Keats =

** Original version of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1819  ** Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing. Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, So haggard and so woe-begone? The squirrel's granary is full, And the harvest's done. I see a lily on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever-dew, And on thy cheeks a fading rose Fast withereth too. I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful - a faery's child, Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild. I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She looked at me as she did love, And made sweet moan. I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long, For sidelong would she bend, and sing A faery's song. She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna-dew, And sure in language strange she said - 'I love thee true'. She took me to her elfin grot, And there she wept and sighed full sore, And there I shut her wild wild eyes With kisses four. And there she lulled me asleep And there I dreamed - Ah! woe betide! -   The latest dream I ever dreamt On the cold hill side. I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried - 'La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!' I saw their starved lips in the gloam, With horrid warning gaped wide, And I awoke and found me here, On the cold hill's side. And this is why I sojourn here Alone and palely loitering, Though the sedge is withered from the lake, And no birds sing.

Dorothy Porter
= A selection of poems = http://www.austlit.com/a/porter-d/poems.html

The Bee Hut

//for Robert Colvin//

There is a dark place on my friend Robert’s farm that thrums with the nectar smell of danger.

A swarm of bees has taken over a dozing old shed and no one has the means or guts to move them.

I think of slaughtered Mycenean kings entombed in their brick hive glittering as they lie golder than honey in the old blood dark.

Entranced my bare hand wants to plunge through a hole — now a buzzing lethal highway — in the shed wall.

I love the bee hut on my friend Robert’s farm.

I love the invisible mystery of its delicious industry.

But do I love the lesson of my thralldom to the sweet dark things that can do me harm?

Ode to Agatha Christie

Is this the crucial clue? The bug-like trilobite I bought from a slippery gypsy in Prague, still staring through its crystalline eyes from the floor of an extinct sea.

I am spooked by the abysmal depths of my own life’s mystery. Like a belly-up Christie village I’m nipped by the red herrings of every pyrrhic victory.

Can I pocket and know this sunset flaring over the rollers of the cold Bass Sea? No photograph, no poem will make it anything but a still-born cliché.

Is murdering time the most true and convincing perfect crime?

I tangle in the plot chasing the hit and run driver of my careless past tense. Why does my childhood swimming pool now stagnate darkly behind a high wire fence?

I rub my clever egg head and show off my waxed moustache. O Agatha, what fun playing Poirot to douse my fear in farce!

But how can I make my solution ship arrive? To what shimmering port will it take me? Or is it just an easy exile from blind faith and wishful talk?

Death Comes As The End — Agatha, you threw out cosy when you served up dread.

As surely as my trilobite with the right time, place and gritty clout, may I be preserved as insoluble enigma when a killer comet snuffs me out.

The Hampstead Heath Toad

//for Roger Deakin//

It was one of those beautiful English summer nights.

The lilac shimmer of silent lakes. The whisper of ghost fox through your heartbeat.

But the toad in the hand stank real.

Stank through his palpitating skin. Stank of fear.

Is the fabled hallucinogenic touch of toads just as Macbeth witnessed a hypnotising snare of toxic apparition?

What thrilling doors of perception open to the musky ooze of panting paralysed terror?

Of course intoxicated on moonshine you wanted and will always want the toad to calm down smell sweet and give up his phantasmagorical secrets generously.

But the toad in the hand protected himself.

The toad in the hand stank real.

The Ninth Hour

The ninth hour is here

The ninth hour makes no sense

The ninth hour rises up wearily in a freezing mist.

I have come to a river of blood and vinegar

I have come to a river where only pain keeps its feet

I have come to a bridge of dissolving bone

I have come to a place of burning cold

I am trapped in a space deformed by my own leprous fear

have I the strength to pay suffering its due?

...............................

There is a calm that is no cousin to courage

There is a calm that sits like a quivering ape under the python’s hypnotising eye.

Everything makes you shiver

The hot wind. The rank river. The poisonous euphoria.

But it’s your shriveling flesh that has the whip hand

Your flesh has its own tumorous will

You may think you have been here before

You may think your quicksilver spirit has your furtive flesh licked

But darkness is stronger than light

The flesh knows best who’ll win line honours in this fight.

............................

The ninth hour is here

The ninth hour makes no sense

Don’t pray for a flash flood delivering miracle or clarity

During the ninth hour reason dies of thirst Your blood stagnates stale as a base metal in your mouth

You dangle in a cacophony of retching noise with no grandiose riffs of heroism

You will never forget the foul sound of the ninth hour.

............................

I have come to a river of blood and vinegar

I am here, ninth hour, I am here stripped and shivering.

But listen, ninth hour, listen and pay heed to a new sound in me

I am not here silent and alone

Do you hear the fighting hiss of this geyser in me?

I stand my ground in the undaunted spray and company of my own words.

Acknowledgments
All these poems were originally published in a collection called //Poems January–August 2004// (Vagabond Press 2004) Other credits: ‘Ode to Agatha Christie’ (//Heat, Agenda// magazines), ‘The Ninth Hour’ (//Best Australian Poems 2004// Black Ink), ‘The Bee Hut’ (//Arquitrave// — Spanish translation — Bogota).

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