The Bag
“You wake?” my father whispered. “C’mon, get dressed.”
The windows glowed like rectangular moons
in the dark rooms down to the kitchen light
where he unfolded me a grocery bag
then ushered me outside into daybreak
around the house to the southeast corner
and a gray paper balloon up in the leaves
where the hornets the day before had shot down
so hot I couldn’t yell or hardly breathe.
He took a hoe, climbed up on an old chair,
“Let me have the bag, please. Stand back a way.”
I watched him reach out with one hand, the bag,
raise up with the other, the hoe, and sweetly
cut the stem so the nest came loose and fell.
My bare feet forgot the cold of dew.
One hornet dove, made it after the nest
into the bag just in time for my father
to clench it closed and step down from the chair.
There he stood in the early daylight
with his grin that said, “We, and only we.”
He folded the bag over at the top,
pegged it with a clothespin fished from his pocket.
“Here you are. You can take charge of it now.
They’ll wake up with the sunshine pretty soon,
start to wonder. You can take them down cellar,
put them in the freezer. They’ll never guess.”
I felt the bag, too light as though it might
float up out of my grasp with them rasping
their wings and stickery feet inside there
and their awful internal engines droning.
Heart light as a feather and cold as a stone
with the terror of holding time tight by the beard,
I put them away like a bag of marbles
or tools. I closed them in with the blueberries
we picked and the peaches and tomatoes.