Poems by Mary Noonan
​

The Bee Salon


They bring me the bees in ethanol. 
Some have hung in their yellowing jars 
for a hundred years, like these, 
netted in the streets of Cagliari by a German 
entomologist in the summer of 1909.


I tweezer Number 1 from her boozy amnion, 
she’s a shrivelled raisin and I must restore her 
to beedom. The first step is to wash her 
in my bee shampoo, a secret formula. 
I pop the old lady in a bottle, give it a good shake – 


oops! A leg has broken off… Never mind.
It can be glued back. I pluck the wrinkled worker 
from the suds, lay her on a small cube of foam, 
pierce her chest with a tiny pin, through 
the wing-bud. 


Drying is tricky. A hairdryer is hard on extremities, 
but a small electric air-pump does the job. 
The ancient wing-panes flap in the breeze, 
and black and yellow stripes bloom in hoops 
around the fuzzy torso. 


Now it’s time for the real work of the bee salon. 
I lay her under the microscope and with my 
small sable paintbrush I tease out her branched hairs, 
matted and frizzy after her century-long sleep. 
Her coiffure restored, I take up the tweezers again, 


uncurl her eyelash-thin aerials: her antenna, her elegant 
crop, her segmented legs, and yes, her knees. 
That’s Number 1 prinked and primped! She’ll do. 
I lay her in the shallow drawer, where she’ll be joined 
by her sisters. I only manage twenty a day.


My job title is ‘preparator’, they chose me for my fine 
motor skills, and my eye for detail. I used to be 
an organist. I often wonder about these tiny workers – 
Number 1, for example, was she a builder of hexagonal 
cells, who put her glands to service in the making of  wax? 


Or a mortuary bee, who ferried the colony’s dead far 
from the place of furious secretion, packing, sealing?

​


​

The House That Will Never Be


It may take a few years to build the house 
you refuse to believe in, the house that will 
never be. I see us humping stone and timber, 
with the help of the locals. We will build on 
rock carved in terraces rising from the sea, 
beneath a canopy of carob and orange. 
The walls will be powder blue, the floors 
yellow sand. A stack of wood will be piled 
beside the kitchen stove, and by way of a sink, 
a capacious enamel bowl. In the hallway, 
a bronze brazier will burn olive stones and 
husks from the garden, warming us on our 
return from village or shore, and a wooden 
rail with pegs will hold our battered straw 
hats and baskets.


I know you spit on the twin studies, one each 
for you and me, with walnut tables and straight-
backed chairs, and small casement windows 
framing the distant hills. When the winds blow 
down through the valley, we will light our pine-
wood fires and sit and listen to the crackle. 
You will write all night, I will write by day, and 
sometimes your rhythm will be that of my footsteps 
pacing over your head. Our hens will run giddily 
among the fallen fruit, and at night, our lamp 
will be seen for miles, a shepherd’s fire 
at the far end of a dark field. And oh, 
the dreaming that will go on in that warm, 
quiet house high above the world, the house
that will never be.

​

Mary Noonan’s poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, PN Review, The Dark Horse, Poetry London, The Spectator and The Threepenny Review. Her first collection, The Fado House  (Dedalus, 2012), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and the Strong/Shine Award. She was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Literature Bursary in 2014. A pamphlet, Father (Bonnefant Press) was published in 2015. 

Weblinks:
Mary Noonan’s The Fado House at Dedalus Press:
http://dedaluspress.com/product/the-fado-house/
David Cooke’s review of The Fado House:
https://abegailmorley.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/david-cooke-reviews-noonans-the-fado-house/
Audio of Mary Noonan reading poems from The Fado House
http://www.fishousepoems.org/?artist=noonan-mary

---