My bed here, say four hundred yards south-east of the hive,
my bed here.

Awake in the zoo-dead-of-night
I listen in on the cages of the day’s hours.

There is that question,
trapped and circling a hole in the floor.
A slurry of collapsed swarm agitates in there

like the very black bowl of a
dead stare into itching solid.

And there in that bludgeoned hole is the idea of a calf,
not broken, but fully bruised, and blocked up with clay plugs.

Mistaken bees blackly weep from its ears.

The colony has one time: it’s like a gas
dispersing towards the lowest of pressures.