Did I mention I’m afraid of the dark?
The wind too: Vientophobia,
my doctor calls it. Sets me on edge.
All the little hairs on my forearms
trilling upward. That night
a gale swept through, and a honey bee
buzzed free, lumbering in my kitchen,
wind-rocked darkness, the bee must have
been whistled down and scrabbled
through the fan housing.
She rose by instinct, an older
female sent out to forage
in the fields of the realm, I like to say—
always wished I was one of them,
old-woman-ecstatic lipping goblets
on the trumpet vine,
the bee is rising toward stovelight
when her thorax touches the flood—
living flesh against diode sizzles
down hard, thrown to the floor by force,
no telling if light ate the filaments
of her wings, still carrying treasure for the hive,
oro blando, velvety damp
morsels of pollen. And where art thou now,
eggs? Male and female she makes
them, opens the ductile to her sac of sperm,
fertile and infertile she forms them
in their golden cells. And her daughters shape the waxen
cakes, her sisters build the combs,
and the old ones beat their wings and tremble
in the fields. Now the night careens
toward me in the gyre of the wind,
now the stunned elder sister is laid on alien ground,
your servant, Majesty, alone in the dark