poem 12: The Nest

The Nest

The home was a threat before the hornets froze out in this year’s short winter. Since December I watched the nest deaden. In March I cut the branches from the tree.
It was the weight from the shell that made my body
ache and the caved wall in the side of the beast
that exposed its thousand eyes, the jealous lover.


With its eyes, its shell, its wanting,
the old hive made me a woman.
So now I can eulogize
half the population with:
she was a woman too.
Meaning: we are organs
and all the keys are down.


I learn yearly how to love.
This usually happens at the start
of fall. Now I am half way through
the year and I am hungry.

*

Reading about hornets, I learn the queen
can survive through the harshest months
in a slumber. I learn she is home and bodied.

-marlo barrera, march 2010

How to Make a Bird Sound

Hornet's Nest

Over the winter I had watched a hornet's nest in Oberlin. When I was pretty positive everything in it had frozen dead, I left a note in the mailbox of the house it was in front of. He gave me permission to cut it down. The neighbors were afraid of it anyway.

Here are photos of the incredible treasure (click to enlarge the photos):

    

poem 11

Telling you this now is like holding
a flattened penny between my palms,
is like watching you out of the corner
of my eye in the morning, your eyes
getting used to the light. I’m telling you

I want to believe in god and here I am
pushing myself toward love with such velocity
that I think maybe a South American
poet could fall in love with me
now. We will break each other’s hearts.

I will learn exactly how
Borges feared the sea.

I will take that fear and bend it
into a tunnel that only this poet
and I could live in, huddled up
without waiting. Once I fell in love

with every stranger I ever met.
I would tell them how our days began
destined to meet each other,
fall in love and make each other
feel worth a damn.

It’s not until I give myself over
that even the sea will see
fit to take me.

Know: I want to run into something
hard with my body. Like spit
first hitting the oil, I want to fry.

I will go driving in the countryside,
die at the sound of a barn swallow,
myself and the machine
intimate with a strong tree.


-summer2009
marlo barrera