The Hive
       

Someone else's loss, buzzing through the garden
like the bee that got under your shirt and landed
in your chest hair but didn't sting; someone's grief
right there like a stone in the almost-raining afternoon
with the smell of horse-sweat and mowed grass and hot
asphalt. You held my hand as we stood
at the fence and called to those horses, and felt
the first raindrops and smelled the cooling road.
Someone else's tragedy passing like an awkward truck
climbing our dirt road, unbalanced by the dead woman's
bulky furniture, and the potholes. Someone else
looking out her window at the strangers standing
on the road squinting at her door as though
expecting it to open, then walking slowly on.
Down the hill, trucks rip out the clear-cut tree-stumps
and we think of the coyote who slunk across our yard
with a squirrel in its jaws, and we think of the bears
at our garbage. There were birds calling out like children
playing hide-and-seek, pretending to be hurt
somewhere deeper in the woods, and you tell me you love me
like fingernails, like hair; you love me like breath
when you're sleeping, wrapped up in dust while the crows
in our closets make darkness from the clothes we never wear
and our bodies start crying out in languages the trees
might dance to, as though we were singing.

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Copyright © 2021 Michael Hettich All rights reserved
from The Mica Mine
St. Andrews Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission