I love bees! My neighbor kept bees when I was a child! I bet that honey is wondrous, healing, full of memory and hard work. I want to hear more about it!

The field behind my childhood home stretched for countless acres of tall pale grasses and hidden snake holes, all of them covered by swarms of honey bees. They landed on blue bachelor's buttons and the delicate stalks of goldenrod that made my mother sneeze.

The bees "belonged" to our next door neighbor, as if thousands of migrant winged aliens living in a city of sand could belong to anyone. He crept through the fields in canvas overalls, carrying leather gloves and a bee-keeper's veil for the times he would dip his hands into the white boxes, small specks from our house, removing mounds of lumpy honey.

My friends were terrified of bees. They never walked the field, never put foot softly in front of foot to feel for quail under the brush, never knew an ancient oval piece of black basalt lay at the ridge of Johnson's Hill. I knew these things, felt quail rush beneath my feet, knew the incessant sawing of worker bees floating through the white trumpets of morning glory.

My neighbor siphoned angry bees into a glass bottle and gave it to me to hold. I studied hairs on tiny legs, learned to identify workers and sentries and the elusive queen. I carried his bucket to the hives and stood yards away while the flapping wings of the colony added to the gentle breeze, and smelled the rich scent of beeswax and honey he would carry home to bottle and sell. He called it "bee barf" and though he was right it made the honey hard to eat. He looked like a bee, with short stubbly arms and sun wrinkles like stripes across his face.

Winter was a quiet time. The field slept, covered in crunchy layers of ice and snow, dead goldenrod encased in fairy tale icicles. My sisters would walk the field these cold days, to Johnson's Hill, unafraid of the frozen bees on the ground around the hives, and by February the snowy grass parted for our sled trails like tracks in a rail yard.

One winter I collected frozen bees in a jar. I examined them carefully, made sure I had all worker bees, as they do not sting. I screwed the metal lid onto the jar and slipped it into the pocket of my down Eskimo coat. I put the bees behind the front door, in stasis, until my mom lay down on the coach to watch Day of Our Lives. I tiptoed to the kitchen and set the bottle on the spitting radiator, let the heat and steam and kitchen smells wake the bees, and saw wings start to vibrate, small sticky feet start to shake, until the jar was a rumbling bumble hive of summer. I snuck it to my room and slept that night to the snoring sound of busy insects on my windowsill.

The next morning I bundled up in long underwear and turtleneck sweater and snow pants and red knit mittens and grabbed the reins to the old wooden sled. I placed the rumble bees, bottle wrapped in a towel, on the peeling paint and pulled through new snow, across the driveway, the yard, into virgin white field. By the time I reached the hives, the bees were already back in winter slumber, silent and static like fuzzy bitter popsicles. I poured them on top of the hive, knew they would wake once again, and padded off to Johnson's Hill.

My life is like the bees these days. I'm in stasis, waiting for sunlight, ultraviolet rays of knowledge and understanding and rest. I'll wake up on some good radiator, reborn, life begins again.

poem for January 7

My loss is a hitchhiker, a girl of eighteen with bulging pregnant belly

We ride in silence

She holds her hair in right hand rested against growing baby, long and straight and black and oily

(prose) poem for January 5

The Hat

The afternoon of my mother's wake I bought a Stetson at a pawn shop. It hung next to a stringless guitar. It hung, covered in the invisible dust of money hungry pain. It hung on a tarnished brass hook. I paid five dollars to a man with an orange-striped shirt. I don't remember his face.

I placed the hat on the passenger seat of my car. A Stetson. Black. The oiled pitch of movie malevolence. The hat wore a woven leather band decorated with an engraved silver charm. Two sizes larger than my head. Grade thirty X, the Rolls Royce of fox fur sculpture.

Hey you, I said to the hat. My mom died.

The hat made sympathetic noises. The hat expressed displeasure at the change of schedule.

After the funeral I placed the hat on my bed's extra pillow, the space I saved for a lover. The hat took root. I felt it push tendrils through the green satin, through duck down, through layers of coiled springs and metal frame. I felt it push into the oak floorboards, into the crawl space, into the ground rich with uranium and feldspar. I fueled the germination with my fingers. I traced the spiral galaxy etched into silver. I brushed the hat with care, sprayed it with rain repellent. I loved the hat, loved the way it smelled like roadtrip ozone.

I told the hat stories at night, stories about my day, about my children. I told the hat it was much more than a five dollar whim. Sometimes the hat listened. Sometimes it didn't. The hat's roots pulled memory from the underworld, a place not-yet-separated from its prior owner. The hat kept one upturned side-brim touching my sheets, but the other side sunk into the pillowcase.

My wrists weren't strong enough to pull the hat from the bed. One day I went in search of a shovel to transplant it to a more suitable environment, but I got sidetracked by my father/kids/dog/work.

We're dying, they said. Leave that damn hat alone and attend to us.

I did. The hat understood. The hat was not happy. I asked the hat for help but it sat still. I asked the hat to rub my back, to cook me dinner, to tell me funny jokes. The hat would not budge.

After a while I slept with my back to the hat. I wanted the hat to notice that I was lonely. The hat did not. It remembered the pawn shop. It remembered its old life. It remembered the five dollars. It pointed a brim finger at me. It told me I made the roots stronger.

I grabbed a shotgun and shot in the air above the hat.

Get out of my bed you mean old lazy crummy hat! I yelled. I didn't mean it. I wanted the hat to protest. The hat fell to the floor. It sat there for two days.

I packed the hat in a box yesterday. I wrapped it in plastic. I stuck stamps on the side of the box. I stuffed an old beadspread in the hole left by the roots. I slept alone.

The puppy with the puppy! I love that. I very much enjoyed reading your blog and have added it to my reader. Lovely words, thank you.

I have a huge, enormous miracle to share:

One dog August afternoon, I walked barefoot along the outskirts of campus. I carried my Dr. Scholls, and sang Hurts So Good and Centerfold like I was a rock star.

He stepped out of the dark canopy of trees and grabbed me. He had a knife. He raped me. I don't remember his face or his height. I can still hear him, the way he hissed "don't look at me.” I remember one part with multicolor slow motion clarity. He grabbed my right hand and deliberately broke three fingers, pinky, ring finger, middle finger, snapped them like chicken bones.

Two months later my fingers were healing, but my stomach felt worse, like fire and gunpowder. I didn't know I was pregnant until my breasts swelled. I called a clinic. They told me to bring six hundred dollars cash, a friend to drive, and an empty stomach. I didn't have a friend or six hundred dollars so I stayed home. I had a baby daughter. I gave her up for adoption.

I keep talking around the rape and birth. I'm a sheepdog circling the events, corralling them, pushing them into storage pens for slaughter. I'm a blue merle sheepdog with watery eyes and a limp and all I know is to keep circling, keep those sheep from running free, I don't want them to break formation.

My birth daughter turned 21, called Catholic Charities, and they called me. I said yes. Yes.

I drove to her parents’ home. I thought about the years between the rape and now, the adventure of campouts and school field trips and pizza Fridays, all the x's in my cross stitch life, how I added color and texture, how I always left a corner undone. I'm so different now. I'm not that girl in the woods, that girl with broken fingers and no friends. I'm not that girl. I thought of the photos my birth daughter sent, how she looks like that girl, looks like a young me. I know so little about her. She looks like me but she's a stranger.

I turned at a blinking red light and shifted down. My daughter stood at the edge of the gravel drive, and I stepped out of the car and backwards in time, to the night of her birth, into her arms.

All I know is you get what you get. I got an old new daughter, not a stranger, a real child just like her brothers, and my heart and arms and mind couldn't find a difference.

I don't remember anything I said to her or anything she said to me. But somehow a million million busy cells swapped stories and memory and we found ourselves on the black lake behind her house, in a blue paddleboat with a candy striped canopy, alone on the lake, drifting, drifting, not paddling, resting, letting the water transform two decades into glass shattered reflection, into nothingness.

Now, a few years later, we've developed a beautiful relationship. I don't know who I am to her, really, but to me she is my daughter, my full, living, breathing daughter who I have loved every minute of her life.