2

darkness pulls the moon up,
cut in line with the stars.
night falls from her and showers my skin:
i feel like laughing - almost.

dreams recurring and when interrupted, pick up where they left off. perhaps conscious reality is just this, at a collective level; i am an r.e.m. fragment within some other beings wave length. a butterfly's - i must have read that somewhere. i imagine a turtle or seahorse. a dark ocean lit with only jellyfish.

nocturnal sine waves - squeezing between window and wall, humming along my skin,
calling. flight for the sake of flight - for the feel of the wind - i watched them,
all summer - large birds; i feel them now, loose and splitting my heart seam.

merry go rounds most always feel faster to the passenger than the onlooker.
the passing blur of world on a travel weary window's underside. a traveler of the in between

... going and coming - i wish i could choose to make it happen or prevent it: pull a plug so i drain away - but only when i choose.

creped mysteries dropping blossoms. the air snaps amidst otherwise inaudible music, swelling out from the evening's red light, healing the air that felt all scraped up and tuned to static during the day; healing my bodies broken rhythms. drowning music drawing ghosts from the dying. such a small sound - a sigh alone can fall across the whole world and shift its orbit - knock a season clear off the calendar. no one misses it. stories must be told to stay alive.

fragments - 1

we had bee's in our birdfeeder. you saw them coming and going a lot - thought there
was probably a hive. toward evening, the thickness of heat and bright loosened,
the bee traffic slowed; i lifted the lid to check - there it was:
a small hive, cupped in the dome of the lid, cupped in my hand, right by my face
- less than half the size of a tennis ball, rounded like that, but much prettier, really.

i am quite allergic to bees and should carry one of those kits with the self
administered shot. it's been years since i've done that; i'm not sure why. our home
here in particular, seems to attract a lot of bees. this last spring our backyard tree buzzed with tangled hot wires - electrical. it took me awhile to locate the sound - organic harmonic - overhead. i recognized a need for concern, should they swarm after you or our little dog - there wasn't a hive then, that we could see - or aggression - just life - loud in response to the sweet smell of a huge tree. as for myself, in as many years as i've lacked a kit,
i've not gotten stung.

i'm not really afraid of bees; june bugs scare me more.

crashing through the front door, flushed in deep breath. you'd hit the birdfeeder with your soccer ball - hard. enjoyable fear rushing out from your pores - a story
and sun-shine-sweat swarm around you, lifted your words to hold up somewhere
between us, suspended. chased clear around the house and

... a knock at the door interrupts; (the bees?) a neighbor with a big plastic bottle and some kind of spray attachment. a witness to the incident, insisting on justice - we needed to promptly get rid of them. no longer your story - the backyard,
a fog of chemicals perfumed to smell pleasant and not like bug killer. it hurt my eyes.

staggered flight, dropping - we just watched from a distance. they didn't swarm or attack, they just died. you told me later there were four that escaped; you counted - up - towards branches now bland with plain august leaves.
you wondered that they might return and rebuild. i didn't think so.

this morning, barefoot in the backyard early. letting out our dog, i followed. i usually don't do this; even beautiful mornings feel sharp against something in me deep and still rubbed raw from dreaming. i keep a buffer between myself and that edge when i can - a curtain across the hollow where a plate of glass rests,
undecided if it wants to be a window or a mirror.

still, i wandered over to the birdfeeder to ... look. down beside my foot, the dislodged empty hive. a shock of symmetry. bees have 5 eyes - 2 that are compound through which they see color and shape. this science byte i recalled, drifting my thought at the comb ~ disco balls - their vision of the large world manifest and shaped as their home. compound hive - they live in their own eyes. some poet's do this with verse - artist's with music or brush stroke or lines. music - harmonic trees.

in the bottom of the feeder, there were four bees - i fell into a rhythm counting their signifigance - 1,2,3,4 ... 1,2,3,4 . an almost pefect + ,
their heads at center and facing each other. subtle movement clarified
their breath; they weren't dead, but if not rebuilding, than what? how large is a bee's lung? why are some hives huge and dripping with honey and some, like the one by my foot?

it was too hard a thought to imagine they'd wait there, just breathing
amidst temperature and noise, until they died.

anthropomorphism? i'm disinterested. we cannot know what we cannot know. my skin's illusion doesn't separate me. my heart is a disco ball. loss is large. enough said.

perhaps the hurt places in different creatures seek each other out - breed a kind of love between them.

shallow expansion, my breath trailed down, deep, fragment of a word in there unfinished - unconscious - my arms spread wide pushing back invisible walls. long and thin as a girl, i see my shadow, so stubborn and fragile. i want to kneel down and kiss her. boneless, she disappears into my gesture; folded into hope, re-emerging to add the sound of a hive, light and empty, carefully wedged back into the lid of a birdfeeder.