What Is It About the Bee?

English: Yellow jacket queen Image copyleft: (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What is it about the bee

that makes it bite me so excruciatingly?

Or is it its cousins I’m thinking of?

Either way I do not love

any of that family.

Too bad the bee and the planet are hand in glove—

maybe if we just killed the other three?

© Julianne Carlile

The Dream Fish

My grandmother used to take us fishing.

Feet dangling from the pier,

she’d bait our hooks and

take the fish off.

Most too small to keep,

she’d throw them back.

Sometimes, we’d get one we could take home.

Once in a while we’d catch a crab.

They were tenacious and hard to shake off,

despite our best work,

and Grandma was often tasked there too.

Years later I had a dream of that shore:

I’d waded in, hands in the water,

trying to catch a great big fish.

The fish was beautiful,

all the colors of the rainbow and more:

it seemed to shine with gold and silver;
it had a preternatural light.

No matter how hard I tried,

I could not grab that fish.

Long after I awoke, the dream stayed with me.

I couldn’t catch it,

and I couldn’t let it go.

© Julianne Carlile

You Go On

You go on, not remembering,

or else don’t care, which is the same,

and I think on the lovely ring

you took back, worn by what’s her name.

Nature consoles me; it has heart,

a heart I did not find in you.

Nature will not leave me apart.

Nature, in fact, is just and true.

The shorn grass falls out in my wake,

the swallows follow on my way,

I resolve to make a mistake.

Before I see the boy, I say,

"I love you," and your voice or God’s,

on the summer wind answers, nods.

© Julianne Carlile

Dog Psalm

Psalm 9 (album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As the puppy cries for the mother he will never see again,

So cries my soul for You, Oh God.

As he searches among the blankets for her nipple to suckle,

So search I for You, Oh my Lord

As he resolves to make a home among people not his kind,

So I resolve to make a home among people lost from You.

© Julianne Carlile

Star-Crossed

I would often ask you for the stories

of how I ended up here

and you would tell me:

I met your grandfather when

he came to work for my parents.

He was a really sharp dresser.

Then you would laugh.

I wondered if you knew what you were really

telling me:

That grandpa had been given used clothes

by your lover, a man you were enamored with

and at first, at the play,

you thought grandpa was him.

(His scent permeated the room;

you could feel him—his essence,

like a star beam covered in gold dust.

But then when you looked,

you saw it was grandpa.)

It must have been really funny,

but what’s really funny is that’s why

I’m here.

© Julianne Carlile

Sonnet for Nicky

Long-haired Chihuahua (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

He has a head like a little flower,

A ruff like a lion around his neck;

All day long he dreams of having power—

If he has to charge someone, what the heck?

I really think he likes to dream of life,

What it would be like to be on his own,

To be in charge and to have his own wife—

Especially when I get on the phone.

But it is easier to live with me,

To not worry where his next meal comes from.

I feel for him then, the poor little bee—

The turmoil he feels when I tell him come.

So I live with him and he lives with me,

And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

© Julianne Carlile