Wasp Nest

You see it in the grass first,
far off, a mottled spill
of black and white
that seems to assume
the form of a face,
fierce in its dichotomies,
all eyes and open mouth,
an ancient warrior or a god,
a blessing, or a scream.

But when we approach,
it falls to fragments,
this warren of abandoned cells,
an ivory parchment
spotted with dark vacancies

and around its dried silence,
black and gold bodies,
not the furred jewelry of bees
fallen from their diligence,

but wasps,
their martial curves
turned in on themselves and stilled.

It had to be poison
because nothing akin to sun,
or bird, or wind
would judge and delegate
this ruin.

I nudge a few with the tip
of my running shoe,
grind their husks into a dust
of dissipated eyes, of tiny legs,
of vitrine wings.

I think of the language of bees,
their gliding waltz
that maps to far lodes of nectar,
and wonder if these too
had their own ghost dance
and where it might have led them.

I think of us, seen from above,
the work of boundary, house, and road,
the hegemony of the line,
the spill of cities and their fevered light
pulsing from one kind of emptiness
to another.

Jim Nawrocki's poetry recently appeared in the anthology, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed. It has also appeared in Kyoto Journal, Poetry, Chroma Journal, modern words, and the website poetry daily.com. He writes regularly for the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.