Stunned by my Skin's Warm Reception
Blue spruce are having ideas everywhere
in twilight. And ponderosa, their voluptuous
cones strewn like hives where
queens could emerge.
Perhaps drawn by my torpor, perhaps
loitering from the day’s heat
the bees interrupt our first time
on the cedar deck insinuating their
hum into dusk.
I thought they disappeared with the sun.
In noon light their lust can’t get enough:
coral, lupine, poppy, delphinium
now they turn to me.
They don’t like white I remember from
the beekeeper’s daughter and consider
myself safe in my alabaster linen shirt until
three of them, intrude and
I am stunned by my skin’s warm reception.
Bees of the invisible
the poet called them
and they are tempting me to be
authentic, my skin the skin of an
itinerant, feet bottoms tender from
so many steps. What is happening is
happening despite my lethargy or
because of it and
I am ripe for change
in the evergreen-now
barefoot I snatch up
xylophone, flute, improvised cake pan, chanting
don-gha-boo don-gha-boo
in sync with this legerdemain: this humming, this droning, this slight
buzz-magic stinging me, waking me, sucking me from
underground tombs and airless institutions
this gracious winging (fresh as
my dear dead)
this song I - before the bees - had lost.
