In the yard, the wind hasn’t yet begun its nervous rearrangements
like a hand in a pocket jingling loose change; everything’s still

bound to the earth by its own thoughts. This season has returned
too many times to be an accident, always in the usual bright vest.

Jigging the front path again and again is the same robin,
coming close enough for me to see the song twitching up

the dense scales of his throat. He’s been insisting that
we’ll have a gorgeous clutch the color of pallid veins,

that I’ll doze on a throne of halved headlines and butcher
string. I tell him hush. That the neighbors are already talking.

There, the deliberate shadow of a large bee being cast
and recast in the shallows of morning light, and the movement

alone is enough to make me leave the porch’s shade and follow
it out and up into an implacable brightness, seize it

and feel its terrible answer pierce the inside of my mouth.