Roadside Stand, Rt. 101

Roadside Stand, Rt. 101

for  Professor Gillian Osborn, my teacher

Partway through January the beekeeper was dead.

I’d drive by winter

day after winter day seeing

all his brief spaces cave in saying I wish I had

bought some of his honey.  Now

I never can.  All through February

and March I said this and too into April and May.

And the bees in the upper field I imagined them

dormant and chilled and seduced into dying

like their handler falling free after his shut off heart.  Someone

had taped the cold out and I said the moon has gone down on them

completely.  And well past May and early into June I saw all

the bee boxes were gone and the road that led to them had been

filling in with spring, and the road itself was being

remade by the hands of the land again

and the dismissal of man.  It’s deep into August

now.  The beekeeper’s Quonset hut

has been sold at a small roadside auction

and all his tools and deflated snowman for when he sold

Christmas trees and wreathes, maybe an occasional

fruitcake.  And too

his vegetable stand: his corn his squash his early then late

          beans and tomatoes.  All the berries that a simple New

          England town could yield and suffer up after being coaxed

and cajoled by all his bees.  Those occasional

          peaches for the slight of a lesser sun, a hardier, bitter bite.  Nobody

          resurrected it for him.  The field is now nearly completely

          white with Queen Anne’s Lace.  The road is still

filling in.  I watch it tilt itself toward and then finally into the woods and take  to redacting the signs that the seasons

or the children

or the deer may have sent down

          to the ground NO TRESPASSING—CAUTION, BEES—RAW

          HONEY.  and occasionally (because now I know

          he had a sense of humor) LETTUCE TURNIP AND PEA