The Doctrine of the Signatures

The herb beds lie like
Freshly filled graves
Fresh flowers, plaques
Bunched; Dilute
Heavy-hearted mourners
Picking out their tombs
With a quick look.

Trevor came for Hyoscine
An anaesthetic found
In the Mandrake’s root.
The chaos of the stars
Had made his head ache  
He stopped the chink with 
A sprig in his lapel.

Classical Dioscorides
Found a cure for grief
Seed of Our Lady’s
Milk Thistle. Cut a
Druid’s throat for it
With his sickle;
Blood on the grass
In the stone’s loop
At Long Bredy;
Bid a brooding Nero
Switch his cherry laurel
For It.

Eve pitched twenty bunches
In her husband’s study;
Lissom, deliquescent
Names:
Lily of the Valley, Meadow Saffron and Foxglove
The three graces, begging
For a man’s bite – one night
Of passion Evie did
She ran the leaf’s spine
Over her tongue and passed
It to him in a kiss.
He died on the way to the fridge
For a glass of water.
Now she wreaths his tomb with them
Paris of the toxic breeds.

John too had read
Dioscorides -
He had no colour
In his cow eyes -  
His broached pupil
Filled the iris with its yolk
The day he lost his bloom;
Five in the green wood.

Following the book he
Tried mother’s milk mashed
With Sulphur-coloured
Frankincense
Applied Cuttlefish ink
With a Rainin teat pipette;
Probed the comb
In the sacked apiary -
Honey
Cleans away things that darken
The pupils of the eyes.

The lowest temperature
A bee can fly is 10 C.

Manco came for Indian Sage
An old slave amphetamine
Eupatora Perfolia.
White empathy cloyed
His line died moon hives ago,
Hiding in the bright vines.
High he drove a motor boat
Across the English Channel;
And drew a neon Nazca Line
In the phosphorescence.
The tide swept the krill to
Trace the hummingbird’s blur
And the crew reported a
Thrilling too swift and feathered
For propellers on that night’s
P&O.

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