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Honey
In the rotten bowels of cattle, in their swollen bellies
and bursting from their sides, bees buzzed and swarmed.
– Virgil, Georgics IV
All winter the Nightly News terrorised
this easily distracted viewer
with the enemy's sly, unstoppable advance
through barrancas and sewers,
infiltrating abandoned packing plants –
corps of killer bees, "Africanized"
by some unforeseen Mendelian prank.
And now they're here, in the eaves
behind our house, a swarm as thick as grapes
or Milton's congress of fiends—
my own Pandemonium. What dire traps
will they set? My father would've strapped a tank
of bug spray on his back—that was his job,
like cutting knee-high grass
or pulling beers for the drunken mob
tippling perilously in his bar.
He was a man who liked the sheen of clean glass
and fruit without a single insect scar.
What a welcome for our first and newly born!
Snug in her aquarium,
she could've waited, but then the water burst,
and what was hidden by the dam
roared downstream, a disaster rehearsed
as often as the resurrected morn!
I know what I should do, raise my Black Flag
and give the massing horde a blast.
But something holds me back, a veto
from my vegetarian past,
perhaps – or just fear of going mano
a mano with a knife-wielding bug.
I study them, but though I’m weathered, I’m no sage?
The swarm seethes like my old man's beard
when I’m drunk with spirit or deep in prayer –
sure to say something weird
about the cord which binds all happiness to care –
a crib, no doubt, from some best-forgotten page.
More sensible, my wife calls Pest Control.
"There's a vector in our garden,"
she almost yells into the startled phone.
Afraid what kind of warden
they'll send, I say, "It's okay, hon. They're gone" –
(it was true!) like fairies into the sky's lapis bowl. |
