Worrying the Bees

A red welt blossoms as memory—
only it’s not memory, not exactly.

What I call memory is merely an image
ringed with potential, unverified:

a purple clover in a field of grass,
bee-stung, or the possibility of pain.

The mind learns to spread white lies,
and tethers second-hand stories

to the particulars of pain and poison.
Honeysuckle. Chokeberry.

Years later I watch a fat bumblebee
lolling the head of a purple clover.

We both steal nectar sips; I pluck a petal
and pierce it with my small, white teeth.

I keep thinking the memory is bee,
but in fact it is bee-sting. I trust myself less.

Later still I step on a ground wasps’ nest
and make no sound. I hear them waking:

tuneless static crowds the open airwaves.
I accept the landmine as if stillness

could delay the swarm, and it does.
The understanding of pain is not pain itself:

a flesh memory forms for a moment
that never was. Electric comprehension.

I step off the mine and the wasps burrow
into the tender arch of my foot,

quiver beneath my translucent skin,
each one a splinter vibrating with purpose.

In a poem made of wax, we wait
for a clear tessellation of metaphor,

but I keep coming back to amnesia
and whether loss might be a kind of solace.

I rest in the language of honey and hive;
I listen, again, for the queen’s long piping.