Emulating Hymenoptera (For Donald W. Baker)
1.
Your poems I find most touching are the ones
that brush the skin of childhood, graze the cones
that once were filled with syrup, browse the bags
that once stored bursts of popcorn.
There the salt
of butter, still attractive, and the melt
of ice cream, cotton candy, colored snow
invite quick wings and buzzing.
Fragile bees
and wasps and yellow-jackets search out sweets
where fairground gates are locked and hornets treat
themselves to beads of loss that once were sweat.
What's left is what most matters.
I think of seeds,
as if a poem like this one could be grown
and tongued off sticky paper: Take this room.
The bed is someone else's. Rain blows in
and sun has bleached the covers.
What I own
are fingers on the keyboard. Keyboards click
and make the sound of insects. Words, like bees,
scout out the hidden meadows, hollow trees,
that compass in my life.
Keys dance them home.
2.
The paper nests of hornets,
spit by spit,
accumulate to houses, nurseries hid
and shingled, many layered,
row on row.
The larvae in their casings swell to burst.
I think of rain and bullets
and the sound that paper makes when tearing.
Warring bees
like rain attack the window.
Foolish wrens have broken necks that way
or fallen stunned.
Still poems preserve a sweetness.
I have come to seek the taste of flowers.
On my tongue are marigold
and bee balm.
There are poems that I will never write
as there are rooms
that I will never enter.
Still the sun
becomes a sum of sweetness.
Reedy lives of summer vibrate down,
but perfume clings
and fingers go on clicking,
simple fare this time of ink and paper.
Winter bears
translucent in the sun tear open hives.
3.
My hunger is transparent
scouting trees that drip with sweetness, trees
that proffer cones,
the salt of which is resin.
Right or wrong,
it's been hard work to knock
the old nests down and every year rebuild them.
There is no home
more solidly connected,
tighter tied to rafters than these nests
and I am glad
to let wind have them;
wind that like a bee is never done,
but settles for an instant,
then is gone.
4.
And so I credit bees,
present them gifts
and catch them in my hands
to let them go
like flowers cast on waters,
living bread
that will one day bring profit.
You have said that patience is what counts.
I counter: bees
and wasps and yellow jackets.
Such as these, if childish in beginning,
swarm to grow
and congregate to visions,
overflow like drippings from a faucet,
stings and sweets.
5.
I struggle to beginnings.
Still the child that was and never was,
but lived to grow
and grew to age, now aged,
declines to die;
revisits lost beginnings,
seeks out hives,
abandoned nests, dead lanterns,
hollow trees,
and shredded paper sacks.
An old man's poem,
like summer-scented beeswax,
stores up sun
and pollen for transference.
Young mouths feed
on love once made abundant,
then was lost.