Above the playground, from the hung-out
highest limb of a creaking, leafless elm,
the bee hive breathed all summer long.
A low sizzle high up, it grew
like the mound of mud thrown out
by a crawdad, hurled up
in wind around the thick and empty limb,
a great bronze breast hung sweet
above the faces of children.
The sky was it own
electric fence. Every high and wobbly
fly ball fell from its arc
as though swatted down, a egg shoved off
the sky’s blue table. And birds
gave the whole tree a berth,
even the woodpecker, who strayed
from his place among locusts
to patter a while the elm’s infested trunk
and flew away wild in swoops
from the dark swarm
the hive hauled out to halt him.
Only the wind moved high in timber,
its hiss across leaves
a harmony to the bees’ wiry buzzing.
Still they sent out sentries,
who fought the wind’s tug and toss
and wound up lost, stung
out from sinking their skewers
all across the enemy’s invisible flank.
On such days, the hive heaving
overhead, teachers called
their students in, and from the windows
all afternoon small gazes flared
hard, wondering if this day would be
the last of the bees’ lording over,
the high hold held finally in check.
Windows razzed with grit
and the great bowl of the playground
lay below the school, overflowing
with dust. All around them
darkened toward storm, and teachers
reviewed the choreographies
of disaster. Then came rain,
whipped in the sky to a froth,
spattering onto glass its
millions tiny scars. Here
and there a pane gave out
and the school sucked the cold
air hard. Halls filled with
files of frightened children,
rambling lunchless to the deep
and quiet cafeteria, some of them dazzled
silent, others sobbing, whimpering
for father, mother, sunshine.
They sat below the storm’s
unmuffled engine, and when the walls
around them held they began
to laugh. The room roared
with the voices of children, voices
thrown high and excited by the wind
and their own clattering hearts.
Among such laughter and scoots of stools,
every child forgot about the bees.
Every one but the one who lived
next door, whose whole summer was spent
lolling in the cool near woods
and the playground’s dusty spaciousness,
who daily gauged by his upheld thumb
the hive’s expansion,
whose bedroom window caught every morning
the bees’ first early dronings.
This one hid among coats and sweaters
and the day’s hollow clang
of lunch pails. Knowing
he had only until the rolls
were taken, he slipped out soon behind
his classmates, dodging teachers
in their last-minute swings, and walked
out into rain and chaos, the world
aswirl with water and leaves,
with mud and birds and everything
but bees. With his left shoulder
he leaned downhill into the playground,
the school behind him paling to a hulk,
a shadow, before it was completely gone.
He looked down around him
for the minor landmarks a child
remembers, having studied this land
more carefully than any
textbook. But old grasses
swooned with the weight of weather.
There was nowhere a sign
he could sight from, no hummock of weed
that had tripped him one day, no bare
mark of mud where second base
or third had received his slide.
Now the slant of the land itself
seemed wrong, and he sat
in the thunder and rain, and waited.
Among the stone rumbles of the storm,
wind yelping through the trees and brush,
he heard the first low pop of the trunk
giving way, a wooden spoon
broken under water. The soft
mush of old heartwood sputtered,
quiet cardboard crackling, and then,
while the sparse crown swung silent
in its fall, there were only the sounds of storm.
It appeared black above him,
a wooden claw holding a hunk
of honey, workers, and wax.
He could hear the hive’s
respiration, a million wings worrying
close and pungent air. Down
like prehistoric bird it came,
from a Saturday movie and nightmare,
and he covered his face with his arms,
and waited for the yank or crush.
But he was swaddled suddenly in tree.
All around him leaves and branches
closed in, nipping light and sharp his face
and arms, sending him a foot
in the air on the trunk’s concussion,
and dumping at his feet, on his feet,
an offering of honey and comb,
gold and pearl all across him.
To his left he saw the ground a mass
of bees imbedded in their lives,
lifting up dizzy toward their deaths.
He saw against wet bark the queen
sealed in dollop, still and perfect
as an amulet. A few drones grazed
his anointed body, as though
he were a large and bounteous flower.
He rose and walked into the rain.
For a long while he wandered lost,
until the school rose up before him.
He walked through the door and passed
down halls littered with glass
and papers, slowly,
his feet clinging in their golden boots,
and descended the stairs
to be once again among the others,
children, and teachers, who only then
noticed his absence and turned
to the door, uttered one low cry,
and stopped. The eyes
of every adult and child
turned to the figure in the doorway,
his clothes frayed, heavy with rain,
his face a smear of small bleeding cuts
and drops of honey, winking
in the lights like iridescent scabs.
From his shoes amber puddles flowed
outward. All up and down
his legs was a fresco of bees,
mementos, souvenirs
fastened to a plaque and varnished.
The room lay before him
like a photograph, every face caught
in the moment’s quick shutter.
He will remember them that way,
frozen in their stares,
peering up at the miracle of him,
not knowing whether
the look in his eyes
was terror or the transfix
of high wind and venom. He will remember
himself in their eyes, the look
that will not go away
for years and years
of his life as someone partly other
than human, removed, as necessary
and dangerous as a bee,
as chosen and blessed as any survivor.
In the halls and on the playground,
on the streets, he will feel the glow of gold
they have seen around him, hear the whirr
they heard that day, as bees
came to life in his matted hair.