The Bee Keeper

The Bee Keeper

So intimate in there, . . .

                                                a listening post

Open to the light, to the limen world

Of soul on its lonely path. . .

Shining in silence, the fretful part of me

So steadied by their cogged and bolted stillness

I felt like one come out of an upper room

To fret no more and walk abroad confirmed.

                                                                Seamus Heaney

                                                                On His Work in the English Tongue

Maybe winter is the best time for beekeepers

to sleep eternally.  Their charges are naïve and quiet,
alive but just, stuck to the jellied honey they’d played

almost their entire lives out to make.  Over the cold

bee-box lid the brick sticks mute, the bulge

of deepening freezes and raucous thaws

coming up in ripples of warped wood and chips,

great lengths some, maybe of green,

maybe of red, to tell them apart at her going blind

distance.  They’ll wait, those bees in their boxes,

at the edge of the field as it cuts off and goes

into the woods, trees and bees intimate

with, I can just see it, each other, the buzz of stopping

off, coughing almost on a cache of pollen

after some sudden summer wind or rain blows

through.  And the leaves or the spruce needles keep

them the way a fairy godmother keeps her children:

under the bones of her wanded finger and thumb, or even

that angel in the painting I watched while I grew

up under my mother's buzzing dark, that drawing of a brother

and sister walking across a broken bridge

while the water foams and spits and hurls a few

feet under below them.  Somehow we all make it,

at least part of the way.  We suit up or don’t

for disaster or even just cautious care and walk

to the humming hive to lift the lid to see

all the Queen’s daughters suffer and fuss

and strut their lives in the golden ooze. 

Come spring I bet they’ll swarm, they’ll have to,

their keeper being dead and gone.  And the six

young deer who yesterday broke the ice

atop the grass these few mornings after he passed

will too be gone, lambing some, running some, and

among it all, the bulbous glob of bees,

dripping like a wet, just cut tulip procured

in the rain to save it, save it

wilting without so much as a by-your-leave

or please, please, before they scrum, caution: 

we’ve waited, we have and say, can you ever 

tell us when the master will come

she in her white gauze and smoke?