Upside-down on their mill-stone, the hornets had already begun
That labor for slaves, oblique
Under balancing weights, where their universe hung by a wick,
Till the will of their species was done.
No longer honing their spurs under thorny abdomens
And fording the midsummer, they canted their wings on a slum
Of old parchment, a wafer of smashed candelabrum,
Unweaving and weaving their omens.
Leant to invisible head-bands, hods
Of invisible chalk and saliva, some instinct alert to their need
Had narrowed their compass to this: assembled them out of the
gases, like seed
On a sunflower pod.
I thought of those others: the bee in his ziggurat, ascending
In savory waxes; the wasp turning his pouch like a fig,
Forcing the rind of his world, like the white and the shell of
an egg,
In a pendant’s papyrus.
But these knowing nothing of resins, the Chaldean increases
Of stars in the hexagon, the bells of beneficent amber-
What bounty could kindle their flint in the spoors and the cinder
Of the underground places?
Yet the horn and the needle palpated: made trial
Of their hungers, till a harvest was drawn through their bellies
And rode like the thread in an hour-glass, a stinger of waxes and
jellies,
And struck, in consummate denial,
Till everything blazed like a thought, like a sexual breathing of
gauzes,
While a kingdom of predators, circling, put forth its antennas,
And the poem arose like a hornet in rabbinical blacks and siennas,
On craters and crosses.
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