In the Kingdom of the Ditch

Offering, as One Example, the Satisfaction of the Bee

53 Offering, as One Example, the Satisfaction of the Bee Sun slowly burns the gray tissue of morning, and bees, who spent the night beneath the long flower of goldenrod, sway with the stalk’s movements, stiff with cold and fog. Yesterday a red-tailed hawk lifted from a tamarack to take a rabbit, and on this walk I find owl pellets near a downed oak: the torn limb of a warbler, the discarded head of a shrew. These are the beautiful deaths of usefulness. Imagine your life taken to feed another, your very being consumed in the belly’s furnace, awaking to heavy wing-beat as you fly above the tallest spruce. The best we can hope for is to scatter our selves across the darkest parts of the earth: rain relinquishing these late flowers and our passing love, which too often lusted only for the self, forgetting the sweet tenacity of the bee, the waxen comb of delight. ...