Heart Blue: A Poem

Like a woman offering her profile to a man
who won’t admit to looking,
the bumblebee points east to my north,
perfectly still inside the rumble of her wings.

She is a queen and blind to red.
She has left her six eggs burrowed into
the bowl of wax beneath the rock
beside the iris. She tocks
on the current, holds.
Slides and resumes and holds,
gyrates south, then east, and holds.
still within her wings,
still in the she hover that women do
when their babies are as far
as the iris nearest the stone,
and their men gone.

Afternoon,
and the sky around the heart
is blue.