THE BEES (I)

What was I to do, I, born

when the gods were dead,

and my insufferable youth

spent searching between cracks?

It was my role, and because of it

I felt so desolate.

One bee plus one bee

does not make two bees of light

or two bees of darkness:

it makes a solar system,

a house of topaz,

a dangerous caress.

The first concern of amber

is two golden bees

and tied to those same bees

each day’s sun travels:

I rage at revealing so many

of my ridiculous secrets.

They go on chasing me questioning

my relationship with cats,

how I found the rainbow’s arc,

why the worthy chestnuts

show themselves as hedgehogs,

and above all for me to say

what the toads think of me,

the creatures hidden

beneath the wood’s fragrance

or in the bubbles of concrete.

The truth is that among the knowers

I owned to a unique ignorance

and among those who might know less

I was always a little less knowing

and so little was my knowledge

that I learned wisdom.

--- Pablo Neruda

THE DRIVER OF THE CAR IS UNCONSCIOUS

Driver, please. Let's slow things down. I can't endure 
the speed you favor, here where the air's electric 
hands keep charging everything, a blur of matter fogs the window 
and my mind to rub it. Don't look now, but the vast
majority of chimpanzees on the road's soft shoulder can't 
determine: Which fascinates more, the thing per se 
or the decoration on its leaking package? How like us, they--

(The hand mistook me that arranged my being 
bound here, buckled. I have been mistaken, ripped 
from a wave of in-flight radio: wakened brutally 
is brutally awakened, plucked from the grip of 
"asleep on the slope of an open poppy." One has meant this 
torture for another, clearly. Do we welt the same, 
make similar whimper? Did he take my name? I'll take another.)

it is the decoration. By which I mean, we have a lot 
between us. You're European, and I have been to Venice
where the waters pave and they can't play tennis. 
Fair gondolier, it is my pleasure to confess: nor will you ever 
catch me in athletic dress, hunched waiting at the net 
for a ball knocked fast in my direction, hot with fervor
to knock it back to the opposing player. It just won't do. 

Driver, please. I have shared with you. I have become
a person. That's supposed to make it hard to hurt me. 
The future rises, bellows, wrinkles. I can't keep living 
in a cramped sedan, I won't keep living in a cramped sedan--
though you hold the road, I'll give you that. There are 
instances of smoke and mirror, instances of shouting fire. 
Though you hold the road, I'll give you that, there are
 
instances of "sticking to it" that I can't admire, and ours 
isn't an adhesion I ever expect to look back on 
wistfully. But that's for time to decide, not me.
"Just around the corner, there's a rainbow in the sky."--
Haven't you ever just had to believe it? Look, if it's a cup of coffee
you're after, I bet there's someplace brilliant up ahead. 
I bet there's someplace right around the bend. Ash in the eye 

and the nose and the mouth, shit in the pants 
and the mouth and the hand. Hound on the back 
of the hand and the lap, slap on the face of the hound and the ass. 
Ash in the eye and the nose and the mouth, mouth 
on the nose on the face in the pants. Hound on the back 
of the hand in the lap, slap on the face of the hound 
in the ass. Ash in the eye and the nose and the mouth and

the mouth won't stop, it comforts itself, it comforts me. 
Funny I keep on looking out the window, identifying
even as you do this. The orchids cry that yesterday were pollen 
ground in the fuzz of dead-drunk bees. I will not submit 
to being ferried that way. Driver, please. Where to now, 
Tierra del Fuego? There is no travel but the travel that concludes 
in shrieking with abandon, is there? --No. What you need 

is to remember what it felt like beforehand, that emptiness. 
Call up pictures, melodies, etc., but part of you will resist
that assistance, divide from it. Drag the edge of that memory--
yes, it's more like forgetting--across that divide, until 
something like a rabbit-hole opens inside you. Vanish into the hole.
Vanish, it is your only opportunity. It will stun you 
for another minute, but when the stunning passes, you will again

be nowhere, nothing, and even more at peace with it.

--Timothy Donnelly

ALL TIMES AND ALL TENSES ALIVE IN THIS MOMENT

Mary Szybist

SAD LITTLE BREATHING MACHINE

Engine:@

Under its glass lid, the square
of cheese is like any other element

of the imagination—cough in the tugboat,
muff summering somewhere in mothballs.

Have a humbug. The world is slow
to dissolve & leave us. Is it your

hermeneut’s helmet not letting me
filter through? The submarine sinks

with a purpose: Scientist Inside
Engineering A Shell. & meanwhile

I am not well. Don’t know how to go on
Oprah without ya. On t.v, a documentary

about bees—yet another box in a box.
The present is in there somewhere.

--Matthea Harvey

MISTRESS FORMIKA

In temple city, in this tight lighthouse of rare women,

my pale goggles stinging in the lemon juice
of all my watching, where even your synthetic

hairs are generous, yielding to a stiff ritual, perfect with your
gynecoid east village supersmirk. That smarts!
This perfomance of thighs blessed with an excruciating

unnatural talent for the part. For the parting.
And the pupils, we, and the lashes, all yours, observe
the rules of tragedy-in-sumptuous-fabrics, loving but strict,

in fact bullying, my god the backwatching and the switchblade!
And all imaginary: the spell a queen casts on her bee, a lover will
let herself be made up in orange for the beloved, but yours

is a sweeter excercise, twistier. Thank you, for shaking, for
who hasn't forgotten how to use her diva-noodle?
Can this be too much pleasure in one so smart, debauched

and thin? So far beyond wondering we have fallen
into quarreling, braided evening feelers in hand,
with this dark stallion blindness, too close to the fence to jump

it clean. You, both gate and barrier to the hearth and breast
of eve and adam's apple orchard. And I stumble over
strange broken pieces strewn everywhere, what's the damage?

Is it you sleeping in the grass, dear with a cheeky bliss,
pale and mournful? The delicious no-secret plain and defused,
genitalia quiet and ripe, the gorgon of your hair loved off

and lying guilty where you tossed it,
by the broken fence, firewood for a home too well built
for such arsonists of the flesh to resist.


--Brenda Shaugnessy

GARDEN OF BEES

The narcissus grows past 

the towers. Eight gypsy 

sisters spread their wings 

in the garden. Their gold teeth 

are unnerving. Every single 

baby is asleep. They want 

a little money and I give 

them less. I'm charming and 

handsome. They take my pen. 

I buy the poem from the garden 

of bees for one euro. A touch 

on the arm. A mystery word. 

The sky has two faces. 

For reasons unaccountable

my hand trembles. 

In Roman times if they were

horrified of bees they kept it secret

--Matthew Rohrer

THEIR FACES SHALL BE OF FLAMES

That was the spring the bees disappeared, we didn’t know
where they went, where they’d gone, where they were going, it was a
rapture of the bees, only the weak, the young, the freshly dead
left behind, a rapture of bees, my neighbor with the ducks had begun to walk
like a duck, Follow follow follow Sam he sang as he walked, and they followed,
it was that simple, of course I thought of the Piper, although
this procession was more benign, my neighbor’s I mean, though he intended
to have each for dinner, eventually, and he did not name them,
as we don’t name bees, because we don’t see clearly enough
to distinguish them as persons, person in the grammatical sense, first second
or third, which is why we refer to them in the collective, usually,
they breed, they swarm, they milk their honey for us
in the collective, and they vanish collectively, is this then the true
rapture, was the one true God after all a god of bees, and now she is taking
them home, is this any more comforting than all the other proposed explanations,
pesticide, fungus, mites, electromagnetism, even the infrasound the giant
windmills make, that sends the bats and raptors
to their deaths, all invention gone awry, hive after hive
suddenly empty, as if they’d all flown out less than purposefully, casually,
and somehow forgotten to come back, held up at the doctor’s or the U-Haul
dealer’s, swarms of them, hundreds, thousands vagabond
in some other landscape, or rising, we shall meet them in the air,
at the post office to mail a letter to a woman who might or might not be my love
because a rate change had caught me with insufficient postage
I had to wait, the clerk was preoccupied with a sort of crate
made of wire mesh, through which I could see bees, Resistant the clerk said
as she filled out the forms and sent them, registered parcel post, somewhere
else, only then did she sell me the stamp I needed,
or thought I needed, or hoped to need (there is a season
when one hopes to need), and I thought about what it would be like
to mail a crate of bees, Resistant, to my love, if I had a love, and have them
vanish en route, the mesh crate arriving dusty, empty, one or two
broken, desiccated bodies rattling lightly around inside, like seeds in a gourd,
or like a child you’ll never have, that is, the possibility of that child, the rattling
blood of it, a different sort of vanishing, we would all like to believe
in the act, that Houdini was a man, only a man, as he proved in the moment
and by the precise circumstance of his death, and the fact of his body,
lifeless but extant, rattling around the arcade, the park, the amusement pier
of disturbing coincidences, while in Missouri another hobbyist beekeeper
walks out to her tomblike hives on a spring morning
to find nothing there, just boxes, empty boxes, a sort of game
a child might invent, this rapture, same sort of funny story
a child will invent, when shown a photograph, This is the policeman,
and this is the woman with two heads, and this, which looks like a modest
red house in a suburb, this is really the ghost of the bees,
a small ghost, a modest ghost, like the ghosts of the locusts and the elms,
not a ghost to trouble us, until (in the photograph) the house spreads its wings
and vanishes, as houses do, or as houses will when the rapture extends
to architecture, the god of small houses having, first, existed, and then wed
the bee god, so that we are left sleeping alone again, and out of doors, in spring,
as one more source of sweetness is subtracted from this world
and added to another, perhaps, as we would like to think, one of the
more comforting ideas, a sort of economics, a grand
accounting, until what angel of houses or of bees blows what trumpet,
and we fall as mountains upon the insects, devour them as seas,
scorch the houses as with fire, we become the ground that hollows beneath
them and the air they fly through, their wormwood star, as all the bees of heaven
watch from heaven and all the houses of heaven lean down
for a closer look, and the smoke drifts upward, and we are the smoke, we are
only the smoke, inside of which my neighbor walks, with his ducks, and sings,
and they follow, and my hive lazes, drowses as if they or it were dreaming
us, as if they or us were touchable, simple as a story, an explanation,
any fiction, as if they thought of us, or were praying, or were dancing,
or were lonely, as if they could be, or would be, touched.

--G.C. Waldrep

DCCLXXXII

There is an arid Pleasure —
As different from Joy —
As Frost is different from Dew —
Like element — are they —

Yet one — rejoices Flowers —
And one — the Flowers abhor —
The finest Honey — curdled —

Is worthless — to the Bee —

--Emily Dickinson

AUBADE: SOME PEACHES, AFTER STORM

So that each
is its own, now--each has fallen, blond stillness.
Closer, above them,
the damselflies pass as they would over water,
if the fruit were water,
or as bees would, if they weren't
somewhere else, had the fruit found
already a point more steep
in rot, as soon it must, if
none shall lift it from the grass whose damp only
softens further those parts where flesh
goes soft.

There are those
whom no amount of patience looks likely
to improve ever, I always said, meaning
gift is random,
assigned here,
here withheld--almost always
correctly
as it's turned out: how your hands clear
easily the wreckage;
how you stand--like a building for a time condemned,
then deemed historic. Yes. You
will be saved.


--Carl Phillips

XCVII

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee, And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.


--Emily Dickinson

I, SANDERLING

Barer than January maples, bare abandoned hives:
the bees silenced in their harvest rustle.
Like as to like, the soul
quiets, if soul it is, this bee box
in the chest. What outward presence
calls to inward space, drop your wings?
And what unclaimed interior complies?
Oh the flatland reveals its field of golden
stubble, and oh the sheared stalks
do not cry out. No, the chaff flutters
in the midland wind and the wings of the dead bees
quiver in the box.


-- Geri Doran

THE FIRST DAYS

Optima dies prima fugit

The first thing I saw in the morning
Was a huge golden bee ploughing
His burly right shoulder into the belly
Of a sleek yellow pear
Low on a bough.
Before he could find that sudden black honey
That squirms around in there
Inside the seed, the tree could not bear any more.
The pear fell to the ground,
With the bee still half alive
Inside its body.
He would have died if I hadn’t knelt down
And sliced the pear gently
A little more open.
The bee shuddered, and returned.
Maybe I should have left him alone there,
Drowning in his own delight.
The best days are the first
To flee, sang the lovely
Musician born in this town
So like my own.
I let the bee go
Among the gasworks at the edge of Mantua.


--James Wright