my best gal, tricia

hey kids.

one more thing.  my gal tricia wrote this for me.  she's my favorite poet.  i went to grad school with her.  she awed me then and she continues to amaze me now.  terrific sensibilities and tremendous humor.

thanks, babe.  you've no idea.

Bee Collector in Hospital

When they couldn't find her among the ceanothus, black sage, buckwheat, and poppies, the bees swarmed the attic, into the bedroom sanctuary

where they sought her in the mesh of nets, glass jars, rows of tweezers and pins.
In furious confusion they tossed their velvet bodies against windows, each tap,

a storm that gilded the draperies and bed clothes with their harvest of dust.
There was no one home to see it.

Each bee-- bumble, honey, carpenter, and mason-- lost its dance, held its cellophane
wings close, mumbled a song in sill corners until the heat, finally, took them.

She returned late, dazed and stitched, found her insect-loves brittle with sacrifice
and held each one as tenderly as a raindrop, inspecting mandible, proboscis, and stinger.

Then, head to thorax, she pinned it to the homasote with the grace of a queen.




-Tricia Caspers-Ross
for dee ann