IMAGO

Like a luminous sphere

bursting into myriad other spheres,

the gloss inside the dark

silk-comb will soon erupt,

shedding its bloated light-

belt into the willows’ warmth and

mellow the imago’s folds into

the worker-bee’s chiaroscuro

symmetry. Flirting, for her colony, with

the briar and the anemone, the bee

builds, glues, waxes her honey-

comb into fractals. Like the bees’

antennae, my hands seethe,

ferment, macerate, knead and

shape bread, and build, build, build –

wax words into future domes,

crypts, rooms, nests, poems.