WINTER'S FEVER

On a car ride like a needle threading
through winter, my mother told me
the truth about what it means to be
born a musical instrument, to glisten
like a torn crescendo scattering upwards
in a gust of wind with birds en route
to Mexico. She sang the painful birth
that bled until icicles melted with the infant
that formed. The river tricked the child, almost
tricked the mother into saying yes. She said
it all in one breath. She told me about the night
the ambulance battled winter’s torrent
like a Valkyrie—the baby burned
in the infinite mind and the doctors
could only say perhaps, maybe. The definition
was never given. So they stuck a spike
into the spinal flesh to test the conditions
of meningococcal ivory: the rare commodity
that mother cried over halfway around
the world. They pushed her out the door
into frozen winter so she wouldn’t hear
the shrill shrieks of a baby having its ivory
sucked out through a syringe. In the end
the child woke and he was me.
The car threaded through the stitch work
of silence, finally pulling up the driveway
to amputate rhubarb pies from an oven rack.

BEES IN AUTUMN

Awakened to a buzzing
sound in mid-October, I see

one on my wall: a lethargic
polka dot crawling slowly like

a man going mad—scavenging
across deserts, hallucinating lilacs.

And then one more appears. Soon
the rice paper walls are pockmarked with bees.

White plaster dusts the bed sheets.
The diving temperature (mercury slipping down

the glass tube, soothing the throat of summer
like a lozenge) drives them in.

Cows come home at night, perceiving
darkness, knowing winter. Animal

cognizance tells the eye things it can’t see.
They fly in through electrical sockets,

out of the pockets of cashmere sweaters,
buzzing unknown goodbyes to nature.

They gather on the windowpanes
thinking they’re still on the other side.

And then in dead November I find them
not on the panes but on the sills, asleep

with wiry legs in the air.

Henry Heidger is a writer and poet. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.