Bumblebee
He had just finished unwinding the wild grape vine binding
the mower blades and stood up too fast, the ninety degree
heat and humidity possessing his brain like morphine.
He bent, placed hands on tractor seat, breathed deep,
closed and opened his eyes. Hearing a motor his head
twisted skyward and saw a biplane trailing letters of vapor
roll, plunge, become a bumblebee zigzagging in and out
of the honeysuckle. He recalled that in last night’s dream
a yellow and black sun rose above the hillside, buzzed
until his bedroom window vibrated so loudly he pressed
palms to glass to still it. Fingers tingling, he began to grasp
what his departed wife meant that time she pointed west
as the sun sank, flared, then vanished, but the vibrations
stopped and there he was hours later on a path he mowed
around the prairie grass, leaning over the tractor seat,
skin burning as though an acid-tipped needle tattooed script
across his chest, neck, shoulders, back. When the vines
at his feet wriggled and from deep within white-domed
elderberry behind him his mind whispered, “stand up
straight, peel off your shirt so I can read what’s written,”
the body obeyed and mind, longing as always for revelation,
strained to focus, but the sun’s soft cotton glove seized it,
then squeezed until reason, shape, and color succumbed.
As he stood, his shoulders, back, neck becoming numb,
the bumblebee spiraled out of the honeysuckle, circled,
dipped, tapped his lips, eyebrow, forehead, settled on an ear,
buzzed. At once he understood: his wife meant there was
no birth, no dawn, no death, no sunset. Suddenly she lived.
Again they sat on the creek bank watching silver minnows
dart in and out of the single shadow their bodies cast.
Then they strolled in November sunflowers, her eyes clear,
unblinking, even as snow blurred the stalks. He shivered
and she fanned flakes from his face, warmed him with wax,
placed him beneath the frosted soil. Soon came tranquility
he hadn’t known he needed, the odor of cut flowers, a drone
as if earth were an organ. Now he waits for time to resume,
certain her fingers, like beams of light, one day will pierce
the ground, lift him out, unwind the fibers that bind him.
Season after season he sees her crossing a field of scarlet
poppies, infinite petals stirred by the wings of a bumblebee.
Copyright 2007 University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.
