Into the dry, electrical hum
of summer insects
smoke goes smuggling comfort
across her blood-brain barrier.
Four children in seven years,
in a house the second war built,
a family tree the arms race fed.
Grandmother: How rarely
she feels hunger as hunger,
in the stunned mechanism
of the two-beat flood, a beggar
at the gate of fiercer experiments
shut even to her, behind
his mind’s guarded perimeter.
(After dinner it’s the solace
of Wordsworth or Scientific American
alone.) So, at least grant her this:
smolder for the hive, a habit
to blunt the buzz of
sharper instincts. In time,
blindness. But for now, it’s just
July, two decades before the first
grandchild arrives in this
enclosed carport where her ash-hand
sways as she squints to see
as the honeybee sees: in violent,
shuddering color. Here and there
in Grandfather’s petunias, it takes
to the splayed crimson and indigo
throats that opened this morning
in brilliant photo-synthetic
ricochet.