The world abounds in marvels.
But you knew that, and you know
that knowing isn’t witnessing.
When you knock softly on the hive three times
and whisper news of someone’s death
and drape the hive in black, you know
that anything could be happening inside
the hive but you choose to believe
that grief has bloomed inside the hive
and you are glad that the tradition
doesn’t mandate verification,
doesn’t ask you to produce a single bee
in mourning and you’re glad
because it’s wonderful to just believe.
But I don’t have a hive. I have a lawn
I haven’t mowed in going on three years
and I have bees of different species
lolling on the goldenrod and jewelweed
in the sunlight gracing all of us
like one creation on this afternoon.
I lean in to a sprig of goldenrod
and to a bumblebee I whisper,
“Brother Ryan died today.”
The bee appears unfazed, untouched
by grief, appears to have no plans
to fly the bad news to the hive.
It may be that the work must come before
the grief can be indulged because
the season doesn’t last forever after all.
The sun is on my neck. I bend down
to the honeybee inside the jewelweed,
child of the sun, and once again I whisper,
“Brother Ryan died today.”
The bee backs out and hovers, level
with my eyes, then level with my lips, a honed
intelligence who seems to know what I’m about.
The bee flies off to jewelweed and to jewelweed
and to jewelweed, and the sun is high,
and I am telling you it feels wrong
to expect a bee, who, if she’s lucky,
has about two months to live, to care
about the passing of a man who had been
in the world since 1948. It is enough
to say the words in sunlight, waist-high
in the goldenrod and jewelweed, to release them
one more time among the most bees
I have ever seen, forgetting that today
the daylight will be more or less
two minutes shorter than it stretched out
yesterday and more or less two minutes
more than it will be tomorrow.