Hornets’ Nest in Four Seasons

On the buffy-tan painted house sides

there’s a hornets’ nest we let grow, huge

domed head, anchored crown, helmet of  paper

folded and striated like metamorphic rock,

ashy layers increased by each returning hornet,

chewed wood pulp, saliva, soft tree branches

masticated, first a papier-mâché bulb,

phallic tube, now a bandaged head

swathed in dish towels, unseeing,

pointed chin, mouth a perfect O

the hornets fly out one-by-one

past the stone wall to damp woods,

they drink nectar and fruit juices

return with chewed-up insects to feed

white larvae closed into their cells,

each larva shuts its own hexagonal door,

grows in private within the hive’s

bulbous temple. Vespula maculata,

they fan and fan smoky wings,

immaculate black abdomens, ivory stripes.

Ninety-four degrees, the paper shell

grows beyond yesterday’s, wings like blades

of fans we’ve placed in four windows.

Does one hornet’s saliva make a unique

signature stripe gray? Sycamore suit gray,

cream gray, mouse fur, felted sweater

gray of a cat hairball. The skull swells,

shingled foliations above the garden, a clay bust

a portrait, self-portrait as hornets’ nest,

bald-faced hornets’ nest, bald-faced lie

they chew what they find: window sills,

fence posts rasped as if by razored tongues.

Ring of hornets at the nest’s door,

black type around a well, nightmare scenario

imagine reaching up to touch that swarm,

hot pain of flight. Because it was a marvel

I said: Let’s leave it, gray dross creeps horizontal

along shingles, a needle’s scrawl,

lantern they crawl into, they feed, they tend,

soft page between fingers, this sheet I hold

as it rolls from the typewriter, black letters

faded to gray at the ribbon’s end,

gray of fog and gray of a gull wing tip,

waves to wash one’s face in,

graphite on a graph, I creep below

with laundry basket to the cellar’s cool door,

seven fan their wings, eighty-three degrees in shade—

but you will all be dead

come fall. Will it be all at once, like Jonestown,

or a gradual diminishment?

Fall rain, a slow hornet in the garden walking,

the young dog comprehends hornet,

pulls away. Dripping, shedding water

the nest darkens to charcoal—do they sense it?—

the cooling, shorter days, they must,

temperature tempers their days, flights out, the sun,

squirming insects they pierce and eat,

fanning and feeding, growing their young.

October cold snap, twenty-eight degrees

at dawn the hornets’ nest a stilled

and silver mass.

Flash of sun: feathers, a bird

head and shoulders buried into the hole

eating at the hornets’ nest,

it flies to a grape arbor, bends to eat,

white tooth pulled from the lips of the O

chin-point crumbled, peeling flakes.

Regal. Now the nest bears a crown of snow

two eye sockets, a knight’s armor,

nose guard, visor, empty stare,

like a Persian helmet, museum plinthed

and staring out, that cheeping

I heard in my head and couldn’t place

came from the hornets’ nest, November

it’s packed with birds, ordinary sparrows

roosting in its shell: one bird, a second bird, five

flew out its mouth in the morning light,

insulating, airy layers left behind,

one sparrow burrows through, chin to eye

butts a squirming tunnel

past chambers packed with cells. Gray ruined face,

wind from the north, beat of  hail.

The male sparrow calling: cheep, cheep,

brings long straws, lays them in the cavity,

colonizers of every house and nook, the sparrows

try the hornets’ sphere, break through, gaze out

a second life, second sight.

Behind windows, we go about our business—

feed the fish, wash dishes, go to work, nothing inside

metaphored the scene outside,

raw spring and now the nest’s peeling layers

quivering in the wind beyond glass panes

a silent film, wind lifts and drops, tears

gray leaves, old phone books disintegrating

under a hand lens, pitted and furred,

mothy puffs float above new grass.

Sodden dark, sky-shot through,

peek in one torn hole and out the other wall

it’s blue sky, limbs of the far oaks,

ashy bits we’ll take down come summer,

sometimes they’ll return to the scene, young queens

overwintered under leaf  litter

a memory in the cells, in the shiny body

a south-facing house corner, a site

of pressing heat, food, diligence, and purpose.