An Apiarist

Ordered, golden orchard of budding umbilical pathways Groomed and manicured with subservient hands We few custodians strain in rest-less industry Cloistered within stark and feverish walls

Mask, tool, and smoker shouldered in labor A daily pilgrimage of excremental mud Toward the shrine of squat and droning hives Clock-work wings in swelling chorus

I had begun to loathe the trees in their luster Blooming perpetual, incense and sulphur Fruit dripping from gnarled, alveolar branches like the limbs of a sunken and tubercular harvest queen

Once I rose in stealth to walk by fading starlight along the edge of a sleeping canal Peering through the cataract of sweating, claustrophobic pre-dawn darkness smothering its banks

I knelt at the water's edge Fixated on the silhouette Reflected in the onyx surface As it shuddered slowly into form

Faint glow caught like a handful of bees, stinging, dead in my palm Great soiled aurora advancing, slick like oil smeared across anemic skies

Its luminous tendrils slithered across the rooftops To light this boundary, a curtain of glass The face that rippled, recoiling below me The stricken visage of a familiar and monstrous parasite

I bent, weeping, to drink from the canal The blood which I knew was of my host Beyond the vein unfurled an open landscape whose exquisite austerity would not abide my existence.

The bitterness we sold to the junk manhe got it all right, but we have it still. And when the owner men told us to go, that's us and when the tractor hit the house, that's us until we're dead. To California or any placeevery one a drum major leading a parade of hurts, marching with our bitterness. And some daythe armies of bitterness will all be going the same way. And they'll all walk together, and there'll be a dead terror from it. JES