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.