Not seen for a decade, diver of lupine, horsemint, vetch in the high meadows
of the coast
and Sierra-Cascade ranges, 190 miles south to north, from Mount Shasta to
Roseburg, OR,

rarest of bumble bees, with the flamboyants—Wandering Skipper, Gabb’s
Checkerspot,
Sonoran Blue, Santa Monica Mountains Hairstreak, California Dogface

(my father caught them, collected into cellophane envelopes each pair of
wings hinged to dry
bodies, from the Sierras, the meadows above Tahoe his mother painted, the
lake

a jag of sea-green blue through maize and ochers in her landscapes, after
she stopped
playing the violin and tired of her sister’s theosophy; for years all I had of
his was a cigar box

of light, all this to keep from sliding into darkness, each thing saved part of
a constellation,
one chip of light necessitating the next one’s proximity, forming an outline

someone will trace again and again, into wing or antennae, or hive, or a
storm of bees
from a hollow, from the retreat of another form back into darkness,
through a vent,

underground, and my father, gone for longer than my daughters’ lives,
floats somewhere, talking
to me, whispering my wrongs, my failures, each syllable a bit of dust from
wings),

the disappearing Frosted Elfin and Karner Blue, Mitchell’s Satyr, Taylor’s
Checkerspot.
Who was Gabb or Taylor or Karner, to have their names attached to a streak
of blue,

brushed flakes of cerulean, or orange, or drab brown; or Franklin, who
noticed
the solid black abdomen or the gold U on the anterior of the thorax,

cohabitant on this range with the Western bumble bee, itself rare, and what
we know
pinned to balsa wood, through abdomens, a bee or wasp,

a solitary zebra-stripe, above milkweed, vetch, or top-heavy goldenrod
netted and gassed, how quickly the last ones are with us

then not, a specimen tray in a cabinet pulled out, rows of bodies, wings
flared mineral
light, chitin brittle as pressed leaves. Pollinators, foragers. Signals of  
summer’s height, the race

of wildflowers blooming before the dry grass fires. In a season, to spawn,
wrap in self-made
husks, then unfold, moist, and float up toward the sun or nest and lay the
colony

over the summer, queen and workers, caretakers of the burrow, foragers,
and autumnal queens
to wait through winter laden with the future, laid on a mound of nectar, in a
cup of wax.

This year the cherry-tree had no fruit—or if there was, it was high in the
tree, out of sight—
no bees meticulous in their work, the tree was silent all spring and summer.

(Perhaps my father sought to find a Lepidoptera not yet named, in New
Guinea or Borneo, something
mistaken for sky leaded between the tree canopy, but found none unknown—

or this would be my story, since he told nothing of time, his time in the war,
working
the wounds, the tropic diseases, like most who returned, slowly from their
theaters of conflict,

in silence, so turned to growing orchids, Phalaenopsis, white moth-orchids,
dozens on a spray,
he would cross, hoping some new variant would take, our house filled then
with possibility.)

One monarch drifted over the scattered milkweed plants. A cool spring and
summer, warm
fall, the absence of dragonflies over the meadows and warm lawns. So I
think of the entomologist

waiting in the August meadows of Mt. Ashland where he found the last
Franklin bumble bee
and has come back each year to look again, his specimen box holds three,
pinned, in the light

their thorax bristles golden as though always stained by pollen shaken loose
by their thrum in C,
sorting across scents and chromatics, compounding the nectars, mortal
pollens.

Does one know one is the last, no one answers, or there are no others on the
path
across the wildflower meadows of Mt. Ashland, or no path, the last ones
along it have been gone

for a season or two, the last one a leftover cell deep in a vole’s lair, or a
half-buried fox, sun-
warmed from sleep’s knots. If gone, who would miss them—someone,
searching for one

like a word hovering just beyond the tongue, its meaning he shapes with his
hands, something
infirm, shapeless, “you know what I mean,” just to keep the conversation
going or return it

to where we were, start again, a memory, you are still pitch-perfect, a  
middle-C to tune
the rest by, or is it an A, the oboist’s, then picked up others, that dis-

ease you refuse to talk about, it can’t be you, to be the last one to remember
this and then
no one afterward to call it back, say its name as you gently cup the stunned bee

to show the golden U, in moments it is released, groggy, knowing it must
find its way, picking
its alphabet back from vetch, lupine, horsemint, to bone-hollowed-hive.

poetry-magazineFranklin's Bees

poetry-magazineTurning

Franklin's Bees

Turning