Wednesday, September 12, 2018

procession



Imagine a frame, a fissure, darkness that emerges to sting repeatedly.

Darkness shifting.
Sight now sound,
a ship's horn, up river.
Pull the bridge up.
Let her pass.
Through the morning cool into dew,
cue eyes again,
toward
the green of tree and grass.


Morus alba in the shadows cut by elm.  Three-toed leaves let milky sap.

In early morning white, light and darkness stagger like bumblebees, pollen heavy.

Forward.

White splits garden to prism, light into day. Darkness composts itself.

Comes now chilled sounds.

Honey bees, signaled, return to hive, alive with food.

Wood was listening too, thinking soon sap slippage, dreams.

Seems things entangled so never fall, even in autumn, absolute.

The procession from one holy to another is a drumlin trail, a last sail on Superior, a warmer sock.

Rocks know it, sinking a little more into earth.

Meat bees, called yellow jackets, feed mother, young, then done, die. But not all, never a necropolis, no, a way station, a longer step to step, slow thickening with winter.

Imagine inner heart of hives ticking off slant, moon.

See sun on sumac, a stalled miner, drooping iridescent sweat bee.  A wasp stunned, immobile on frost aster.

I cannot forget their summer forage paths, these bees and wasps, or the heat arc of lignum green and shadow.

I map all fall processions unravelling into midwinter, web thin, on air, water, earth's skin.

Midwinter, this shortest day, begins repeat assemblage, frisson foreword, fractured billions - a body tree rebirth, an altered hive, insulate warm.

Arraigned, all of them. The lost summer sea, tree, wasp and bee, in solstice shadow found guilty as charged.

Imagine a cell, a sentence, darkness surging.

Forward.