Honey Hush

I.

It will be as if: fur. As if trust
could be fur. Imagine,
bees coat the sugar body

that is yours . . .
see how your body hums?
Say you love them. Now. You must

say you love them. And I would, and
—I would, until it was true
almost, and then true:

I could love the bees,
and neither mind nor be surprised
by their weight, slow as drones

and as deliberate, upon me.

II.

Every fall, still, the deer swim the cold channel
between the island whose name I don’t know
and this island.

Their instinct is: they need more; and that, here,
they will find it. From the shore, children
make of their small hands small binoculars,

and guess at which ones will drown.
For some of the deer always drown.
They lose, I think, whatever for a deer

hope can be. And it weighs something,
that loss. How else understand it,
this swimmer, that one, there and then

not, except as when sometimes the body
meets a weight sudden, unlooked-for,
and large, the way persuasion is large—

or despair: no struggle attends that descent.