The Silence After

'The honey bee is often described as a domesticated insect. This is wholly inaccurate. The honeybee is a wild bee. Man has never succeeded in domesticating it in the way he has domesticated other animals.'

-The World of Ants, Bees & Wasps, Brian Vessey-Fitzgerald

He stayed in his study all morning,
and when I went to him
he was standing by the window, his face
turned towards the garden
and the distant droning of the hive.

Do you notice how the note
has changed, he said, how it grows
lower and more certain. The bees
are about to swarm. They will gorge
themselves on honey, then be gone.

It is a beautiful sight and every
beekeeper's shame: the bees spilling
from the hive at noon, the Queen
in flight among them; the cacophony
of wings, the silence after.

I should meet them at the hive's
entrance as they leave, make my loud
lamentation with pot and spoon, try
coax the Queen back to her throne . . .
This time, I will let them go.

After the bees had flown, he walked
in the garden among his flowers;
his fingers stained a pollen-brown
from lilac, rose, sweetmeadow,
when he returned to the house at dusk.

He was silent then as he stood among
the white frames of the bee boxes
in the hall, as though his thoughts had fled
with the swarm, his heart as empty as the hive
he could not bring himself to look at anymore.

Daisy-Chain

Sometimes on Sundays we'd take
the old canal bank walk
from Broombridge to the Ashtown Cross,
my father picking daisies as we went

between questions of How is school?
and Did you score any goals this week?
my embarrassment at his interest saying,
Fine or Only one this time.

Often he would talk about the past,
of how his grandfather passed this spot
every day for nearly thirty years
as he drove the train from Castlebar

to Connolly Station, the canal water
his sign that he was nearly home,
until his early death in a red-brick
terraced house near Great Western Square,

my father saying, I only knew him
by a photograph the way you know my father
through me, as an image and likeness,
as a man about whom stories gather;

and all the while his fingers working
the stems, binding them together one by one,
a chain of flowers forming
in his hands until joining first to last

the circle was complete and he'd
give it to me to throw into the canal waters.
And forgetting school and football,
we'd watch it floating on the surface,

bobbing slightly in our world of lost
connections, the frail wreath being pulled
slowly downstream by the current, towards
the steady, distant thunder of the lock.

The Rings

Washing my face my eye catches
the silver of the ring on my left hand.
My surprise, every time!

My face stares back at me from the mirror,
your naked body pale in the shadows
as you bend to recover your dress

from the floor. I turn.
There are such moments when we could
almost believe . . . such moments.

How last night in the hotel lobby the power
failed again and we gathered around the gaslight
with the others, Mohammed playing drums

and telling jokes I had already heard in Dublin,
the Americans and their stories of the desert.
How you said so little, while I, tempted at every turn,

elaborated on the details of our life together --
you, silent and unhappy in the shadows.
How one smile would have been enough.

That day in Dublin before we left,
the rain bucketed down on us.
We walked out among the city streets oblivious
in our trance of expectation.

Then stopping at a stall on College Green
bought two matching silver rings -
cover for our travelling together
in Islamic North Africa, our faked marriage

and imaginary honeymoon in different
weather. We laughed at the silliness of it,
but pressed the ring deep into our pockets
and thought of nothing else all evening.

Today I find your ring on the dresser.
Last night before you went to sleep
I noticed how, tired of unnecessary
fictions, you placed it there,
and I knew that you would not wear it again.

^

Biography

Noel Duffy was born in Dublin in 1971. He worked in poetry Ireland for a number of years where he co-edited with Theo Dorgan Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry. His poems have appeared in a number of magazines including Poetry Ireland Review, Bellingham Review and Force 10.