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