SUNDAY LISTENING

2015
Ed Bok Lee

“A bee performs the waggle dance when she wants to inform other bees of a nectar source.… During the waggle, she dances a figure-eight pattern, with a straight “walk” in between the loops and a sporadic fluttering of her wings….” —Nova

All morning, our fourteen-month-old
homages certain songs
 
other animals abandoned long ago
to become human. Babbling
 
coos and clucks in a medley, punctuated
by three lung-lustrous sighs.
 
What in our world is she saying? 
Hidden in leaves above us, birds
 
seem to accompany her
meandering soprano, 
 
or is it the reverse? Not a single creature  
cares at this Sunday picnic
 
in the shade of a poplar or
maple or is it an ash—I admit I’m most
 
-ly ignorant of the nomenclature
of trees, wild syntax
 
of grasses, beetles, planets, spores
and so many dragonflies!—
 
each with a language baffling
as this girl’s lexical singsong, comprised
 
of five or six squealing tones, eight
kinds of hum, a funny trill. Sometimes
 
it’s all I can do to lean in
despite the breeze and blossoms
 
bowing and bursting
before us to witness
 
this little heart-shaped mouth
so hard at work with both
 
her mother’s and father’s lips;
all four grandparents’ taste
 
buds; all eight great-grand
-parents’ glottises in one,
 
and so on, all the way
back beyond any
 
human civilization’s 
sibilance, plosives, or diphthongs—far
 
as that one earliest honey
-bee’s waggling hind
 
shuck and swivel of a belly,
so ecstatically determined, despite
 
her hive’s bustling din,
to share the source
 
of a newfound nectar
on the sleepiest side of the wind