The Wasp’s Nest
(in memory of my father)

ho paura someone said
and I fear greatly
on a dark night
when the wind is a fiddle-bridge

sounding the body
(your cheek resting on that certain curve
with nonchalance)
my father was a self-taught man

he held the fiddle loosely
like a girl in a reel
uncertain of the next note
and he was afraid as the strokes

ate out his brain
remember the wasp-nest
that grew under the rafters
the beauty of the hanging shape

a chinese lantern
he bore it before him on a hayfork
humming
but it cast no light

I was charged with opening doors
looking inside and out.
I saw the way he held his head high
tilted like a robin’s

but I could not foresee
the fuses going one by one
until the house was dark
it’s true what they say

winter and the small hours
take the older ones
there is always some funeral or other yes
and the death of fathers is common

look out for the early crocus
he used to say
new lambs like paper bags
scattered in the grass

soul-rags on a barbed-wire fence
for death cometh soon or late
the keeper of secrets
scrambling among trinkets

immortal stories
he could throw nothing out
but the salvage of small things
did not protect him

lovers are specialists
trawling for hope
as my father did
as my mother did

remember how they would swing away
waltzing on eggshells
his hand on her waist
the happy dancers

conducting their own silence
through the crowded night
the thunderous sky
(what I am afraid of

is that it is not empty)
the wind goes down to a bass-viol
in an empty warehouse
where are the stars

we learn that birds sing
long before dawn
and rain in the doorway is soft
an old wrinkled potato is the soul

growing up with death
and there is toxin there
(they got their teeth in us alright)
so considering the evidence

there is no escape
unless it be you and me
stretched out like spoons in a drawer
sheltering each other