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The biography of the bee is written in honey and is drawing to a close. Soon the buzzing plainchant of summer will be silenced for good; the flowers, unkindled will blaze one last time and go out. And the boy nursing his stung ankle this morning will look back at his brief tears with something like regret, remembering the amber taste of honey.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations 1. A cardinal hurls itself at my window all morning long, trying so hard to penetrate its own reflection I almost let it in myself, though once I saw another red bird, crazed by the walls of a room, spatter its feathers all over the house. 2. My whole childhood is coming apart, the last stitches about to be ripped out with your death, and I will be left—ridiculous, to write condolence letters to myself. 3. The deathwatch beetle deathwatch beetle A small beetle which sounds like a ticking watch when boring into wood earned its name not from its ugliness or our terror of insects but simply because of the sound it makes, ticking. 4. When your spirit perfects itself, will it escape out of a nostril, or through the spiral spiral / passage Refers to the cochlea of the inner ear passage spiral / passage Refers to the cochlea of the inner ear of an ear? Or is it even now battering against your thin skull, wild to get through, blood brother to this crimson bird?

I want to be sweet and clear and free, as half a line of Auden, or an episode of the Powerpuff Girls; I want to be dew, and honest with mine, like Bob Marley, or Boesman the Boer. I want to swing and get it right at the speed of Pollock’s light, I want to be deep like Zulu, tight like Tamil, and trust my sense of Sanskrit true with little shame for its will. I want to dabble in the fields ignorant of what I was doing, rub myself on the ruins with a self-induced disease and gleefully lapse the hope to be heard. I want to fix my favourite English words into the forty-fifth century— haw, for instance, or luminary— hiding them in a snatch of prose… passed over in silence like Wittgenstein, no evidence for myself or Laura Riding, like Bharathiyar going mad composing, I want to dissolve into our language printing too little for my age; I want to be obscure but not leaden, flippant if I feel like it, then I don’t mind being called poetically shitty in a note from Manohar Shetty, writing into the time we’ve borrowed, singing from our utter boredom; I want to hold in me the heat of my combustion and leave this sweat-smear as a resurrection: I want to be sweet and clear and free, insouciant, insufferable, just like me.

Debridement Black men are oaks cut down. Congressional Medal of Honor Society United States of America chartered by Congress, August 14, 1958; this certifies that STAC John Henry Louis is a member of this society. “Don’t ask me anything about the medal. I don’t even know how I won it.” Debridement: The cutting away of dead or contaminated tissue from a wound to prevent infection. America: love it or give it back. Corktown Groceries ring in my intestines: grits aint groceries eggs aint poultry Mona Lisa was a man:

This is the debt I pay Just for one riotous day, Years of regret and grief, Sorrow without relief. Pay it I will to the end — Until the grave, my friend, Gives me a true release — Gives me the clasp of peace. Slight was the thing I bought, Small was the debt I thought, Poor was the loan at best — God! but the interest!

The ground cracked like the rough pit of a peach and snapped in two. The sun behind the mountains turned into an olive-green glow. To niña Gloria this was home. She continued to sell her bowl of lemons, rubbing a cold, thin silver Christ pocketed in her apron. Others like Lito and Marvin played soldiers in the ruins of a school, running around mounds of bricks, shooting chickens and pigs. No one knows exactly how a light film of ash appeared on everyone’s eyelids early in the morning or how trout and mackerel plunged from the sky, twitched, leaped through the streets. Some say the skin of trees felt like old newspaper, dry and yellow. Others believe the soapsuds washed aside in rivers began to rise in their milk. One Monday morning, a rain fell and the cemetery washed into the city. Bones began to knock and knock at our doors. Streets became muddy rivers waiting for bodies to drop among piles of dead fish. In a year, everyone stabbed flowers on a grave. This explains why women thought and moved like lizards under stones, why men heard bees buzzing inside their skulls, why dogs lost their sense of smell sniffing piles of rubble to get back home. In a few years, no one cared about turtles banging their heads against rocks, bulls with their sad, busted eyes, parrots that kept diving into creeks, the dark swelling of the open ground or at night a knife stained the kitchen cloth. Instead, niña Gloria swept the ground, the broom licking her feet at each stroke. At the bus station, Marvin shined military boots, twenty-five cents a pair, reduced his words to a spit, a splutter of broken sentences on shoe polish, leather. In the evenings, he counted coins he’d tossed in a jar, then walked home, one step closer to the cracked bone clenched in the yellow jaw of a dog.

“considering that by such trade and entercourse, all things heretofore uknowne, might have come to light.” —Pliny the Elder To cure a child of rickets, split a living ash tree down its length and pass the child through (naked, headfirst, three times). Seal the two halves of the tree back up and bind them with loam and black thread. If the tree heals, so will the child. (The child must also be washed for three mornings in the dew of the chosen tree.) Two men (no, women) must pass the child through. The first must say, “The Lord receives,” and the second say, “The Lord gives.” This is how you ensure a happy marriage: This is how you keep the engine running: A jackdaw or swallow that flies down the chimney must be killed. If it is allowed to leave the house by a window or door, a member of the family will This is how, when your mother tells you she’s going in for biopsy, to make the growth benign: Burn a fire and in the morning examine the ashes for footprints, the image of a ring, the likeness of a cat, a bed, a horse, a This is how you keep from thinking of the one thought you’re thinking: Say your own name backwards three (no four) times and turn around (keep your eyes shut). The unborn child must be called pot lid or tea kettle until you hear its voice. Carry a live bat around the house three times, then nail it upside down outside the window. This will ensure If your mother calls you at 6 A.M. while she eats her breakfast (do not eat after 7), this is how you can calm your voice: This is how you say Good luck and mean An egg laid on Sunday can be placed on the roof to ward of fire and lightning. If you put a stillborn child in an open grave, the man who is buried there will have a ticket straight to heaven. Never sleep with your feet toward the door. Do not sneeze while making a bed. Step on a beetle, and it will rain. Bury it alive in the earth for good weather. Put it in your mouth and your loved ones will When you see a dead bird lying in the road you must spit on it. If a rooster crows in the night, you must go and feel his feet. When a woman is in labor, all the locks in the house must be undone, windows and doors must be left ajar. This will not prevent death but will quicken the escape of the spirit if If the ash tree remedy fails, bring the child to a third (no, seventh) generation blacksmith. The child must first be bathed in the water trough, then laid on the anvil. Each of the smith’s tool’s must be passed over the body, and each time one must inquire what the tool is used for (no one must answer). Then the blacksmith must raise his hammer and bring it down (gently) three times (four) on the child’s body. If a fee is given or even asked for, the cure will not If the phone rings, this is how you answer: This is how you say, How did it go?

I want to be a passenger in your car again and shut my eyes while you sit at the wheel, awake and assured in your own private world, seeing all the lines on the road ahead, down a long stretch of empty highway without any other faces in sight. I want to be a passenger in your car again and put my life back in your hands.

Lodged tight for days in a corner of the wall, ladybug can’t resist the tree, crawling now over cold light, ceramic fruits, tinsel lamb and sleigh. Flies out of the tree to try rum cake on a plate of caroling cherubs. Ends up on her back, wings flared, silly girl spinning over the kitchen floor. Later, between the blinds, tiny bump of silhouette: a stillness against the falling snow.

Would you be well receiv’d where’er you go, Remember each Man vanquish’d is a Foe: Resist not therefore to your utmost Might, But let the Weakest think he’s sometimes right; He, for each Triumph you shall thus decline, Shall give ten Opportunities to shine; He sees, since once you own’d him to excel, That ’tis his Interest you should reason well.