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.