It started out with light this morning, the still blue light of dawn, then sun, now deepening clouds and gray, and a late start. The birds are so noisy this morning; they've all been through the yard at one time or another, cardinals, mourning doves, blue jays, sparrows, and wrens. The cardinals hav been happy for days, perhaps an abundance of lady cardinals. One of the ladies came right up to the window and looked in the other morning, clinging to the screen, her bright black eyes full of curiosity, her smooth feathers that peculiar gray with a lot of orange in it, feathers that look like shiny satin in the sun. Her sharp claws caught the screen making a peculiar sound and she moved several times plucking the screen like some strange musical instrument before flying off.
It's odd, when there is sun, there are spots of bright sun and even deeper shade, but when there are a lot of clouds smoothed out over the sky, the yard is in nearly uniform shadow, with only deep spots under the shed or the truck. Everything darker but a smooth dark, and I had not noticed before that you can see further into the cane when the yard is in the clouded shadow, almost as if there were more light rather than less. The wind that has sprung up is fitful, sometimes dying down to stillness, sometimes making the chimes swing and glint with a flat tinny ping.
Usually when it's cloudy like this there are no bees to be seen, yet this morning, I have seen them coming and going to the last of the ligustrum, or just flying past the window where there hum is to soft too be heard. I know they like the honeysuckle by the back fence and this morning I can see a . . . flock of butterflies, white and fluttery, like snippets of paper caught in a breeze, rising up from the yellowed blooms. Every time you go out the back door you can hear the loud zumming drone of carpenter bees, who seem to like to make holes under the eaves by the garage door, their heavy black bodies flying in tight circles or whizzing past your face. So many little lives we seldom notice, like the chorus of frogs Mother's Day night when we came back from the restaurant, they were so loud, so varied, from ones that sounded like birds chirping to the basso of the bigger frogs croaking in the deeper water of the ditch that runs down to the bayou, dozens of them grateful for the rain we had and singing about it.
I think that bees and butterflies must be common enough for everyone to notice them sometimes . . .
Without Compare
These leavened bees,
this world
hung in concert between, from stem
to hive, each hum touched
with sibling sadness,
tethered
to a diminishing life, bid
to and from.
Worn, the shantung
of them: breathless forms
shuttling through sunlight,
glistening
between bud and home.
How loyally they hold their vigil,
speechless as heirs
pacing a marbled hall,
weighing the falling
pulse of the monarch.
Paula Bohince
This morning there isn't even sunlight, just bees going to and from their marbled halls, and the tiny white butterflies making their own clouds above the honeysuckle. Something about this poem catches the heart in surprise, like the silence of ordinary things that change after someone you love dies, that moment when you realize the change is permanent and cannot be overcome by will, only by acceptance. The drone of bees speaks the daily work of the world that goes on, even after that silence, taking all that they travel through from bud to home and changing it to music and honey.
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