When I heard the bees
living in the roof of Notre Dame
survived the fire, I decided
I could make it to summer.
Without drinking more than my share.
Without fantasizing about two-week notices
and plane tickets. I became an adult
when I realized airports were awful.
Once, stranded in Newark
for the night, I slept on the floor
with one arm looped through the handle
of my carry-on bag—as if I could keep anyone
from running off with my luggage.
Mostly I’ve lost clothes
to weight and wind, favorite shirts
struggling to accommodate new width, good hats
blown right off my head,
tumbling over gunwales and sinking immediately,
no use turning around.
Strange to think of something that held you
becoming litter, strange
to ask a carpet from the seventies
to become a bed. Strange to think that Notre Dame
survived two world wars, bombers and armies,
only to succumb to a few sparks.
My city has deactivated its tornado sirens,
which are also air raid sirens, which means
whatever is barreling toward us and at what speed,
we’ll have to find out another way.
Buildings were never holy.
Bees are travelling preachers, the real deal,
whose one true dream is to fill
empty space with sweetness.

Fear not, my love,
when I wander
from the comfort
of our warm bed.
I have only gone
to the garden’s edge
where the icy river meets
the crumbling wall.
I go there to build
a makeshift shrine
to the moon lighting
the splintered ruins.
See, I’ve taken
the peacock feather
and the glass umbrella,
your father’s weathered
fishing lures, the paper
moth, your watch.
We must protect
what we have built
from freeze and flood,
the fire yet to come.
My duty and my right,
this worry, this looking after.

The Irish swallows take
risks, swooping under, around
the black picnic table,
curving up
near windows, shuttered,
then out to the tree circled by wire
solo on the lawn,
banking round to start again.

Low in grass, a scattering
of buttercups and companions
the ox-eye daisies,
making a galaxy
beneath our feet replacing sky,
invisible, obscured.
No rain at the moment,
a blessing, everything’s soaked, dripping.

Here’s the double self, the one now,
the other of nine years ago,
did you see her white face
from the window,
or catch a glimpse of her shoulder
turning the corner, hallway meeting hall?
That’s the woman
who had a mother then,

which shows: hill of trees, then a field
sloping green and shorn down
to the lake’s edge—that’s how
this heart is, landscape
revealing where we’ve been and are.
Yesterday three times a bird sounded
its cry from pines—
staying hidden, not swooping out

like the swallows. Wet, I stopped in woods,
listening, wanting to see
its shape, was it dove, or pied
flycatcher? My attention
all went to the hidden one—
I’ve spent hours and months trying to know
my mother, now
that it’s too late.

Ecclesiastes 10:1

Step 5: When the Lull-A-Fly wears off, most of your drosophila will be alive, a few will be dead. You can tell them apart by the tiny tailored suits and gowns on the newly dead.

Step 6: Watch them begin the mating practice. The live males repeatedly beat their wings, making songs of pulse and sine that never fail to allure. The dead also make their bodies instruments, but their songs of experience well up from deeper, profound places.

Step 7: Position your magnifying glass above the opening of the vial. Notice how the live male will “strike” or jump toward the female from any direction, landing on top of her thorax. The dead, shorn of their previous physical gifts and gender identities, dip one prothoracic leg in the syrup of rotted peach, cup it gently, and approach another dead fly only from the front.

Step 8: Wait for the live female to thrust her ovipositor into the genital opening of themale to obtain the sperm ejaculate. While the live flies copulate, observe any dead flyshyly glance at the now more-sepia-than-red eyes of another dead fly, rest a mesothoracic leg on the other’s near-transparent wing, and stroke the bend of their partner’s antenna with the foreleg dabbed in moldered peach perfume.

Step 9: Look away.