filling the book

with what I don’t know about
trees, their loves and losses
intimacies with beetle and worm
higher math. how to curtsey in

and bow out, gracefully
to say no and graciously
yes, these distances between
and how to bridge them. why

a lover fades before your eyes
or changes, or you change. how
to get up every day, new
in the eyes of dog or child

to prevent disappointment.
why words come thick
(fast in your youth, in dreams)
then vanish like the bees

though all the scented flowers
lead like a jeweled trail
to or from your heart—
and all the silent waiting

watching the neighbors

dreaming crabapple, pomegranate-bright
paired cardinals, redbud, tulips bobbing
in tattered sunlight—I see people—
outside!—discussing the trim of a tree

strange

how nothing in pendant birch-pods
questing tendril peas nor even flight of bees
suggests an asteroid skimming past
only five times farther than the moon

 

…but it happened…asteroid info here.

A Bee Story

They like blue flowers
also purple, yellow, white
(something about ultraviolet light)
but pink, red, orange are good
and a fragrance, not too sweet
(they love herbs, mint); bees need
a place to drink, shifting shapes
and new blooms as the season
wears on, gentle sun-warming
after a winter’s long rest—

Bees work hard at their harvest
bumbling from instinct to beauty
and perhaps in another life
I could be a bee, happily

 

I spent a LOT of time in the sun yesterday, planting flowers for myself and the bees. I have also been reading this beautiful new book I found at the library, THE BEE-FRIENDLY GARDEN, by Kate Frey and Gretchen LeBuhn.

For next year’s garden

bring me canna lilies
red and gold, leaves bold
unfurling palm-like, shading
striped, streaked, splotched
great reedy canes
buds ruffled, spiraling
inflorescent
throats blushed
to bring bees, birds, bats
and if we can’t live on
through frost and dark
we’ll make paper, dye, beads
and music from the seeds

Playing with this prompt from Margo Roby: Wordgathering, also inspired by a gift of canna lily rhizomes from my son’s horticulture class.

Bees, Kids, Stonehenge

We breed them for calm
We hijack our own future
We will be buried
rows of standing sarsen stones
puzzling some other species
 
Practicing tanka for the Yeah Write September poetry slam. Also reading this article about stolen bees and this article about a new discovery near Stonehenge.

Hoping for the Homestead

There’s no need to settle—
ever migrating, we light
on a blossom song
until we’ve drunk our honey-fill:
apricot, linden, clover
and by the lakeside listening
for night music, we dream
of trails wending west and west

Inspired by Margo Roby’s Poem Tryouts, “The Streets Where You Lived,” and including parts of names of several streets on which we’ve resided: apricot, linden, clover, lakeside, trail, west; with “night music” standing in for Mozartstrasse.

Once and Future

These years I have burnished
silver, shelved desire
as a thing to sip and sniff
parceled out love as if
the supply might dry up—
What use? Tonight, dozing
fireside, if snow-wind brings
blackbird note, I’ll swallow whole
a drop of hot sun enough
to build and howl and spill

and light my way
to riverside where summer
bridge glints gossamer
humming like bees—
only a step into the forest
fleet-foot past crone’s hut
to rain-hung green-washed glade
where he waits, my blackbird boy
dark-eyed, impatient
to take me to his breast

Wizard

I had a prentice, once. She came across 
the river, bright belief like starshine, sharp.
I taught her names; to listen, still; how words 
quick-hum inside the oak, how they can build
and howl like lightning splits the sky, and spill.
We strung them fine on heart-string rope to make 
a blackbird song.
		  She’s gone. To have her back!
but autumn spells and heartsease hold her now.

 

A little blank verse for the Yeah Write May poetry slam.

Blackbird

All that long-lighted day I watched her
rope-spinning, flinging it bridge-ways
across the clear river, bee-hum loud
in the glade. Rain held off and held off
as it did in such a summer (a wizard’s trick
or maybe of the crone herself). A girl gathering
words like blackberries, fingers mouth juice-
stained and she never saw me in her headlong
desire but oh, I would have told her heartsease
is not worth the price. For a word I would have
told her an eased heart is nothing, songless.
But she came by belief and all that light-
long day I watched her, aching, for it was
only a step to the crone’s hut and now
she’ll never find her way back.

Hiraeth

It was only a step into the forest
to the river running fast and clear
and I knew that summer trick
of spinning strong rope
from paper and heart-strings
twirling it high and far
to snag lightning-split oak
where wizard-words swarmed
like bees, spilled like blackberries
to fill mouth, pockets, buckets

It was only a step from the forest
to where the crone sold heartsease
for desire, a mere bucketful of words
and a spinning strong rope