Bee farmers warn: the good honey’s gone.
All of it’s been harvested. What’s left
is chaff, summer’s dead
matter. Give up, intruders, cry the guards—
this season, the bees won’t wake, and the honey
of their sleep is noxious.
It is said that when bees can’t migrate,
they hibernate in a dragnet of bodies
around the queen, rotating outward
for warmth so no one dies. But somewhere
in the outskirts, a worker bee might fall
into a coma, envision a lighthouse
of nectar, viscid daisies trapped in royal
jelly. She must’ve dreamt this, drifting farther
from the nucleus of spit-warmth
and swaying. There is no place for dreamers
like her in a complex system: metropole
of honeyless apiary, its deadbeat
machinery. I can’t explain my trespassing
with something simple, like the yen for honey,
or humectants for a lady’s quondam
queendom. The hive breathes all the wishes
I don’t have. Empty haven, lantern of viands—
I almost miss the way the skylights
once chased my shadow across topiaries,
each footprint striating the damp loam
along the knoll, toward the bees,
what quiet, what hum. This time, I take only
the bees that don’t thaw, frozen and harmless,
their home on the ground.
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