I am drinking
bees, said the greedy
magician, besotted with thoughts
of drawing sweetness
past its golden dregs,
past gulping down spent
wax, dead brood, dropped
pollen. I am drinking
all honey from now, from endless
lines of cells of morrows
and tomorrows, sucking
pleasure away
from this wanting world.

Here is the body. Now
that the life is snuffed, we perceive
in its smoke wisp’s scent
that unknown fires
burned in them, that
there were depths and darks
and lights. Let us initiate
anatomy. Make the cuts
and lift the surface, with blades
that are, of rude necessity,
dull. Sorry about that.
Lift out the entrails and engage
the deedy work required
to unwind their coils. Gaze within
the heart and breathe the lungs’
last air. For every death
is built of reasons that the life
had found, and the loves
and musics. In that hollow
ash, illegible, and embers
warming but obscuring.
Memories that can be hard
to make out in the body’s cavern,
and harder to comprehend—why
this image of a baby’s silver spoon? This
smell of lilacs over slanting
streaks of sun? Are those the clacks
and whoosh from wooden
roller-coaster tracks? And what
were built on them? Analysis
is groping, and falls limp. We’ll never
find the all who done it, nor discern
the fullness of the person done.

If I didn’t believe
in the souls of oysters,
I would think
they were messages
sent by ocean. Saying:
kiss of seafoam, flex
of muscle that had held
against the tugs of sea stars.
A message so secret
I would pop it in my mouth
though I would have to
leave the nacred wrapper
to be studied, maybe solved.