The Clinch Mountain Review 2006

Swarm

Near the end, she spoke as if waking from a dream
to common light,
her fingers on the bedclothes
untying words to loose like petals of fog.

Whenever her husband’s bees
swarmed from their hives, the noise
like a saw inside her pulse, she had to run
after them and bang a kettle with a big spoon,
a sound the escaping swarm would take for thunder
and settle on a branch to be caught and housed.

She cried then, she said---just sat and wept,
every time she saw the bees betrayed---
and couldn’t explain,
ringed by shocked children, the sound
of the angry swarm,
that followed her across decades:
bees, their penned fury.



Pond

Self-ironist on the mirrored bank,
I trick the pond to life with a pebble
and speak, haloed by the water’s trouble:
“Carp, cynic and fat by your sewage drain,S
will you nudge among these slimy stones
when I am perfected to a pile of bones,
softening beneath the caustic rain?”

The wind, for only answer, harries
a rattle of newsprint into the trees.

Rutting dragonflies twist in couples,
green as rotting bronze, and kiss their doubles.
Bold again after a minute’s quiet,
profuse frogs yell themselves hoarse
by heaps of garbage, a discourse
on the tadpoles’ choreography.
Old car batteries seep and bubble.

The slow carp oozes through mud,
mud-fleshed owner of the lower sludge,
easing past broken bottles to draw
little prey within the circuit of his jaw.