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July's
Entomology
July's insect sun, its hive above the yard
drips its blinding sugars on our tongues.
The kids are strung along the leaves, cocoons
of so little memory but what is shared
by the maple's limb, that red festoon
of birds, those frogs of sturm und drang –
becoming
what the senses always urged,
what they always meant by being. This span
of trees with loose follicles of leaf, the star
of synapse where sight and knowledge merge
into one upheaval of the dead's desire:
What
could it possibly mean other than
the magi's return to light-imbibing fields
where grows the germ and mystery of faith?
And
if not Christ, then the hive's collective arm –
something giant that finds us in its world,
not as strangers, but as daughters of the worm,
a tongue unwhorled
from the butterfly's mouth.
Conversions
for John Wood
Not given to dreams, my father,
who loved the world with long teeth
and jawed on wads of wax like a wasp
right up to the end, gave little credence
to a place more perfect than this.
Even
as my aunts and cousins
conjured Christ over his bed
and tried to loose the scales
from his eyes, he saw things,
not golden tunnels, just the world
shimmering like dragonflies
above clean water, and beetles
rising from the fields with fire
on their tongues, a pentecost that he
could understand at last.
Outside
his window, the pears
were ripe and heaping on the limbs,
the bees gathering like magi
from their vacant mangers.
He
didn't say it. He didn't have to,
as his body began to mirror
the carpals of a leaf. We prayed
all through the evening hours,
while the beetles rose in pitch,
rebuking our disbelief.
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