Catherine Daly
Bee Superstitions
as on a bee in a crystalline – Elizabeth Barrett Browning I. A book in a block like ice; even bees enter paradise. Plato or Ambrose, or amber, sap, born with a mass, Black Mind in the mouth, poet or orator. See the attic bee, archaic torso excised from quartz. A swarm of bees: the house will burn. Why am I cold? The hive is not temporary. A head of bees: insane. Light of the mind, cold and planetary. Creation. Secretion. Decreation. II. life is a buzz of bees around a lance point – Khansa Bees more than dinner, words drop sweet as honey. The hexagonal bite produces poetry, like a comb. Ceres says what Saturn doesn't utter. Tell the bees, I mean, ornaments. Knock. Talk. They might leave. They might recite a psalm. Bees dead, Cyrene feasted him; he drowned. Soul, being, migration, marriage, hymenoptera. Veil-winged. Going my way? Natural crystal thrust. A good catch. A virgin will not be stung.
Catherine Daly lives in Los Angeles, and is most recently author of the collection Vauxhall, her seventh book of poems, which is reviewed in this issue of Melusine.
