Swarms
       

The first swarm hung
like iron shavings
from my horseshoe magnet
when I was ten.
Moiled on the branch
of an ancient oak
in the Cuyamaca mountains.
My father beside me, pointed
with his burled walking stick,
and compared the buzz to
WW II bombers.

Twenty years later
a swarm agitated
the eaves of my mother's
Umbrian house
while she slept off anger
in the hot afternoon.
My sister and I also groggy
with spent rage, slumped in the red
metal garden chairs.
In our mother's studio, painted bees
dried on her recent self-portrait.

Three more years
before the next swarm
in a friend's summer garden,
congealed fist of sex
on the lemon tree,
queen at the center
encrusted with drones
workers attendant to hiving lust
as we considered what lay couched
in the long afternoons
of our marriages.

Now nine years later
the bees' condensed flight
mimics sub-atomics,
cloud chamber scribbles
that mark the fields
of the invisible.
My husband and I gather up
our picnic and watch
the bees clump,
understanding that
the world as we know it
has ended again.

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Copyright © 2019 Regina O'Melveny All rights reserved
from The Shape of Emptiness
Sheila-Na-Gig Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission