Wasp Sting

The anticipation of pain made me kill them, 
buzzing just past my ear as I checked sweet peas 
and basil that morning. For a week, I watched 
wasps build a nest the size of a peach on wood, 
planks of the fence, weathered by water, yellow, 
teak, rust, cedar planks, a puff of nest, wasps 
tending each round that would bring more wasps. 
They were beautiful in purpose as they walked, 
attenuated fingers, hinged knuckles, striped, walked 
the growing sphere of paper with little rooms 
where translucent larvae might grow, where wasps 
would tend the garden until it grew one of them, 
realized, the body of a fossil, the body of its time, 
buzzing the origin of living things, hinges like these
I kill. I do not want to feel the sting that keeps the beast
away, that keeps the wasps alive, so made, miracle. Poison 
takes their nerves seconds, these beautiful things
designed in the forge of beautiful things, craftsman 
in champlevé, in cloisonné, myriad eyes, knowledge
for building things. Poison puts out every light, antennae 
testing the air, legs negotiating terrain of what
they built when they were alive. Gravity is blunt. 
It pulls them to dirt. I am not one to suffer pain.
This one away clings to the quiet nest in the afternoon.


Dormancy

I wish I could be this still, resign 
myself to stillness a long time,
close like this, wait, become something
small enough to wrap inside a dragonfly wing, 
that shimmering netted translucence.
Something small shares the imprint
of my hands and face folded in smallness, 
my voice like mica tucked between cells.
I’m curious about the next century, so I wish
rubble from the temple will protect me in darkness, 
keep wars above ground a while,
keep lovers there too with their jewels
and perfumes, candles burning, wet mouths, 
wrinkled sheets binding their limbs,
slow down the sun, let generations of mammals 
blossom the night with hooves and fur,
bugling that rattles the firmament. The fruit 
may cling to the seed still, mute sweetness 
fossilized to something like pitch or silence,
the sweet dates the pharaohs loved and Pliny praised.
Ruin is transitory. At some point light and rain 
may find me, break me open, send the moonlight 
from the shriveled thing, and what shall I be then, 
amidst the animals I have not seen and language 
like weather, Being still Being, its heavy fruit
in the hand, the sound of dry leaves striking 
stones of the wall? An antidote for pain,
liqueur, gong for the deep that doesn’t end soon, 
sea shell with enough salt water at the coiled center 
to make us shine, the new instrument of bliss.