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159 f r o m g o u r d s e e d h y m e n o p t e r a It’s clinically wrong, but this begins with a drink, alone, back from the emergency room, cortisone in each hip, welts heating up in clusters on right arm, chest, back, inside right thigh, left shoulder, and between the eyelid and eyebrow, twenty-one stings. I’m not sure yellow jacket or hornet. Doctor says it doesn’t matter, both hymenoptera, Little mean bastards, they go for the eyes. A wonder of innocent membranous wings again after six years, come to me not wandering, but in my own remote meadow-yard, swingblading what I take to be my duty of tall weeds. Now days of itchy skinconsciousness, thankful to be anywhere, burning to scratch blood. They smell me with my venomous sensitivity, me especially. I have heard what some objective someone said: Coleman is riddled with fears. Well that may be, and the problem then: to boil what mixture I have into soup, a glad courage to be sipped as I walk back without a shirt to retrieve the swingblade where it fell, skin so awake to air and any slight furry hair of bee that lights, forerunner, pre-bee of swarm-to-come that cannot be fended off, the thought of which musn’t. Last night this dream. A woman lines up juice glasses, drinks for me, clear liquid. In the bottom of each, under ice cubes, is a live, moving-its-legs, bee. I’m expected to drink the stingers down. I’m hesitating. • • • 160 f r o m g o u r d s e e d I didn’t see what I hit in the grass that caused this. Often it’s clearer. I have known when I was swinging into a hive-nest and gone on slow-motion with a long swing. Make-happen and let-happen and other happens out of nowhere. I cannot untangle the green wire, but I know the feel of that sound around my head. Swollen, blackening, and finally patient, it gives me new eyes to see the lovely obstructions, the bamboo scaffolding. The air only seemed to be thickening into knots that kill. I didn’t foreknow these beestings. I had the dream, but no clarity, the way now I have angry bee-acid in me swelling to circulate. Look at this line of drinks, a future of juice glasses, each with a scarab waking more and more in the melting and the hesitation. These are fearful gifts that I accept, and cautiously hold to the light, and swallow, biestings, the old word for the first milk, which is clear, from the mother’s breast. Now you’ll be crazy over bees, says Benjamin, long distance, among my other fears of motorcycles, power tools, snakes on low-hanging branches, and I summon them all to let them hum around my head, one at a time. I don’t need another black hood of buzzing. More than three, I hit the water quick, and you can laugh if you want to. I choose to watch my daylight panic as a rock does, secretly covered-uncovered in the stream. ...

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