The beekeeper

(Adlesic, Slovenia)
Summer comes luscious as amber and honey.
It flows up from willow roots, the rushes' dead stalks –
a hum soft under sound – to whisper the fields awake.
It floats within wind-rivers shaped from prairie grasses.
Borne upon bees' wings, the days are sweetened to fullness.
Suddenly, in the orchard the greenest suggestions – new
leaves – try the light, urging the trees' black branches.
No surprise, then, to see bees leave their hives. They'll linger
and linger along the white of pear blossoms: a white, perfumed,
that through the village goes, quick with warmth,
even down to the stilled, chill shadows of the forest.