Excerpt from Blind Huber

BLIND HUBER (i)

Opaque glow where my eyes should be,

what remaining light, eyelids

thin against it. Soothing,

as if all I pass were encrusted in wax,

dipped upright — wax bush & wax

bench, wax man, wax tea, waxy cup to waxy

lips, my eyes now more like their eyes,

morning filtered beyond translucence

as the acolytes cover their queen.

By the sound they will soon

swarm, clockwork, the frenzied heat of wings

form droplets on the walls of

their city, their city softening, now twisting

just out of shape.

SWARM

When you see us swarm — rustle of

wingbeat, collapsed air — your mind
tries to make us one, a common

intelligence, a single spirit un-
tethered. You imagine us merely
searching out the next

vessel, anything

that could contain us, as if the hive
were just another jar. You try

to hold the ending, this
unspooling, make it either

zero or many, lack

or flurry. I was born,
you begin, & already each word
makes you smaller. Look at this field —

Cosmos. Lungwort. Utter each
& break

into a thousand versions of yourself.

You can't tell your stories fast enough.
The answer is not one, but also

not two.

HIVE

What would you do inside me?
You would be utterly

lost, labyrinthine

comb, each corridor identical, a
funhouse, there, a bridge, worker

knit to worker, a span
you can't cross. On the other side

the queen, a fortune of honey.

Once we filled an entire house with it,
built the comb between floorboard

and joist, slowly at first, the constant

buzz kept the owners awake, then
louder, until honey began to seep

from the walls, swell
the doorframes. Our gift.

They had to burn the house down
to rid us.

AMBER

To hover
the imagined center, our tongues
grew long to please it, licking

the walls, a chamber built of scent,

a moment followed by a lesser moment
& a hunger to return. It couldn't

last, resin

flowed glacially from wounds in the bark,
pinned us in our entering
as the orchids opened wider. First,

liquid, so we swam until we couldn't.
Then it felt like sleep, the taste of nectar

still inside us. Sometimes a lotus

submerged with us. A million years
went by. A hundred. Swarm of hoverfly,
cockroach, assassin bug, all

trapped, suspended

in that moment of fullness, a
Pompeii, the mother

covering her child's head forever.

Copyright 2002 by Nick Flynn. All rights reserved.