Poem: "Falling Asleep in a Garden"

by David
Wagoner from Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems. © University of
Illinois Press, 1999.

Falling Asleep in the
Garden

All day the bees have come to the garden.
They hover,
swivel in arcs and, whirling, light
On stamens heavy with pollen, probe and
revel
Inside the yellow and red starbursts of dahlias
Or cling to
lobelia's blue-white mouths
Or climb the speckled trumpets of
foxgloves.

My restless eyes follow their restlessness
As they plunge
bodily headfirst into treasure,
Gold-fevered among these horns of
plenty.
They circle me, a flowerless patch
With nothing to offer in the
way of sweetness
Or light against the first omens of evening.

Some,
even now, are dying at the end
Of their few weeks, some being born in the
dark,
Some simply waiting for life, but some are dancing
Deep in their
hives, telling the hungry
The sun will be that way, the garden this
far:
This is the way to the garden. They hum at my ear.

And I wake up,
startled, seeing the early
Stars beginning to bud in constellations.
The
bees have gathered somewhere like petals closing
For the coming of the cold.
The silhouette
Of a sphinx moth swerves to drink at a flowerhead.
The
night-blooming moon opens its pale corolla.