B Minor

This fortnight past the house stands wide
all openings to the garden, sun outside
disrupted by the settling leaves, the yellow ripples
stirring on the floors within and thence reflected
upward so the walls are also warm and stippled.
Bees have wandered in with their mellifluous reeds
and make us into an instrument : the unsuspected
harmony of rooms reverberates them and our minds
are resonant. This music that the summer rarely heeds
and only momentarily, now the fall re-finds
as if the insects, ending their concerto, mount
a drone of final scales, not tuning up but out.

© 1984 Nicholas Messenger

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