Spring Dwindle

Spring Dwindle

Because I live on honey from Round Rock, Texas,
whiskey from Lawrenceburg, Kentucky,
tea from England and lemons from exotic lands—
a medicine of sorts—the bees, they come to me at night.

They whisper secrets, they are supposed to be asleep,
this is a pace that they cannot sustain. The honey bees
lick my tongue and cry, an awful keening keeps me
up all night. The wasps are furious and sting

my sticky fingers—oh noble starving savages,
oh people of lust and fury—and the moths fall
and are silent, paper-thin and pinned to nothingness.
The bumblebees fill my teeth with an aching hum,

I spit honey and blood, I am filled with a strange vibration.
My limbs dance wildly without restraint: no knowing
or saying only movement huge and inexplicable
as the moon—meaning embedded bone-deep—

over the next horizon, where to find safe harbor, an aching field
of flowers where the radiance is inescapably sweet (we swarm
out of sheer gladness) (we swallow the shuddering sweet
into ourselves) (we brace for winter) which does not exist.