Now Welcoming All Bees Onboard the Flight

“Bees have congregated on the tip of the wing”

says the pilot, voice sizzling
over the speaker like . . . well, bees.

So we wait in our recycled air,
each of us singing silently

inside our minds, a buzzing round,
a silent, synchronous prayer

to break loose the colony
or cluster or whatever it is,

to shake free the hive and
let us depart. Dear nature,

how silly we are to think
you won’t eventually smear

over our metals and wires.
How silly to think that

in pursuit of the survival
wired tight inside you,

you won’t crawl into our
microscopic crooks and crannies,

won’t break our brilliant tech
bit by buzzing bit. We cover

our hybrid bumpers
with stickers for SAVE THE BEES

and tsk tsk tsk our cfc breath.
But reclamation

is the song I hear just now—
a faint whir building

in the rear of the jet.
Like erasure, black and gold

felting the last hues
of the human age.

Outside on the runway
a worker in yellow stripes

lets a leather suitcase fall.
A worker in sickly

yellow stripes points up at us
and flaps his tired neon wings.

Waxing Moon in Pinedale, Wyoming

All the way north
the sun sinks
like a broken boat
into a sea
of black cows. 
Past Rawlins a song
of bikers splits
the highway, 
their shadows
like bits of my past,
missteps and regrets,
stretched long
then obliterated
on the hot blacktop.
Later, in a cabin
south of Jackson,
another sunk ship—
the moon drips
through lace drapes.
Above us in bed
bare bulbs bloom
from bone,
a luminous elk rack
blessing our headboard
with bony questions, 
casting skeletal spells
on the patchy quilt. 
Beneath the quilt
her stomach is also 
a waxing moon,
new life turning on
in the shadows
of ancient forms. 
When we first
passed into town
the bent welcome
sign had read
like a prophecy
or a poem—
Welcome Home!
it said, You’ve found
all the civilization you need. 
And who were we
to argue? How would
the rags of doubt
ever suit us now?