Franklin's Bees

Not seen for a decade, diver of lupine, horsemint, vetch in the high meadows

    of the coast

and Sierra-Cascade ranges, 190 miles south to north, from Mount Shasta to

    Roseburg, OR,

rarest of bumble bees, with the flamboyants—Wandering Skipper, Gabb’s

    Checkerspot,

Sonoran Blue, Santa Monica Mountains Hairstreak, California Dogface

(my father caught them, collected into cellophane envelopes each pair of

    wings hinged to dry

bodies, from the Sierras, the meadows above Tahoe his mother painted, the

    lake

a jag of sea-green blue through maize and ochers in her landscapes, after

    she stopped

playing the violin and tired of her sister’s theosophy; for years all I had of

    his was a cigar box

of light, all this to keep from sliding into darkness, each thing saved part of

    a constellation,

one chip of  light necessitating the next one’s proximity, forming an outline

someone will trace again and again, into wing or antennae, or hive, or a

    storm of bees

from a hollow, from the retreat of another form back into darkness,

    through a vent,

underground, and my father, gone for longer than my daughters’ lives,

    floats somewhere, talking

to me, whispering my wrongs, my failures, each syllable a bit of dust from

    wings),

the disappearing Frosted Elfin and Karner Blue, Mitchell’s Satyr, Taylor’s

    Checkerspot.

Who was Gabb or Taylor or Karner, to have their names attached to a streak

    of blue,

brushed flakes of cerulean, or orange, or drab brown; or Franklin, who

    noticed

the solid black abdomen or the gold U on the anterior of the thorax,

cohabitant on this range with the Western bumble bee, itself rare, and what

    we know

pinned to balsa wood, through abdomens, a bee or wasp,

a solitary zebra-stripe, above milkweed, vetch, or top-heavy goldenrod

netted and gassed, how quickly the last ones are with us

then not, a specimen tray in a cabinet pulled out, rows of  bodies, wings

    flared mineral

light, chitin brittle as pressed leaves. Pollinators, foragers. Signals of 


    summer’s height, the race

of wildflowers blooming before the dry grass fires. In a season, to spawn,

    wrap in self-made

husks, then unfold, moist, and float up toward the sun or nest and lay the

    colony

over the summer, queen and workers, caretakers of the burrow, foragers,

    and autumnal queens

to wait through winter laden with the future, laid on a mound of nectar, in a

    cup of wax.

This year the cherry-tree had no fruit—or if there was, it was high in the

    tree, out of sight—

no bees meticulous in their work, the tree was silent all spring and summer.

(Perhaps my father sought to find a Lepidoptera not yet named, in New

    Guinea or Borneo, something

mistaken for sky leaded between the tree canopy, but found none unknown—

or this would be my story, since he told nothing of time, his time in the war,

    working

the wounds, the tropic diseases, like most who returned, slowly from their

    theaters of conflict,

in silence, so turned to growing orchids, Phalaenopsis, white moth-orchids,

    dozens on a spray,

he would cross, hoping some new variant would take, our house filled then

    with possibility.)

One monarch drifted over the scattered milkweed plants. A cool spring and

    summer, warm

fall, the absence of dragonflies over the meadows and warm lawns. So I

    think of the entomologist

waiting in the August meadows of Mt. Ashland where he found the last

    Franklin bumble bee

and has come back each year to look again, his specimen box holds three,

    pinned, in the light

their thorax bristles golden as though always stained by pollen shaken loose

    by their thrum in C,

sorting across scents and chromatics, compounding the nectars, mortal

    pollens.

Does one know one is the last, no one answers, or there are no others on the

    path

across the wildflower meadows of Mt. Ashland, or no path, the last ones

    along it have been gone

for a season or two, the last one a leftover cell deep in a vole’s lair, or a

    half-buried fox, sun-

warmed from sleep’s knots. If gone, who would miss them—someone,

    searching for one

like a word hovering just beyond the tongue, its meaning he shapes with his

    hands, something

infirm, shapeless, “you know what I mean,” just to keep the conversation

    going or return it

to where we were, start again, a memory, you are still pitch-perfect, a 


    middle-C to tune

the rest by, or is it an A, the oboist’s, then picked up others, that dis-

ease you refuse to talk about, it can’t be you, to be the last one to remember

    this and then

no one afterward to call it back, say its name as you gently cup the stunned bee

to show the golden U, in moments it is released, groggy, knowing it must

    find its way, picking

its alphabet back from vetch, lupine, horsemint, to bone-hollowed-hive.