The Bee

A ricochet,

she races, lingers,

hurries to be forgotten,

the single vowel of a teeming alphabet,

too small to carry meaning.

Privation and bright colors,

these are what stir the amber full-stop,

this fragment made of hunger.

Dawn too cool,

noon too hot, where is peace

for this searcher? The chapter is the same,

beginning and beginning,

another blossom with a secret nearly as sweet

as its promise.

Almost followed by almost,

she survives beyond knowledge.

Even her dance of distance and direction

is the gavotte of decimals learning a new

place among the zeroes, notes finding a new

high-point within the octave as she

zig-zags, color to color,

clover to fuchsia to sage

in the only daylight.

Bee Swarm

Diving into its own intensity,

getting all the time greater

in noise and force. A frantic, powerful

entity not connected with the dawn or the night,

an inflamed person risen up furiously

primed, and not nearly finished, getting

greater in girth and sound

with a timbre like a gregorian single-note, a swell of voices

enthralled by its own harmonics.

A slowly lifting gordian knot

of riot that sparks

flint-chips, amber arrowpoints, a fighting host

hovering and casting a boiling shadow

above the sidewalk where the frail ivy

has just the day before been

tucked into the erosion-wrinkled land,



the wan green flags of the novice ground-cover nothing,

not even living, compared with this

muscled rage that by an hour’s

tumult is absent, gone, two or three

spent winged splinters of the once-great

concord left behind on the ground,

while everything else has swept onward

to the places where day hides its power.