A Traveler's Log


Toucans and Hornbills represent the unexpected in travel, wildness, delight, and surprise. Where they live, other wonderful animals and plants flourish.

Travel entails new experiences - new sounds, different smells, surprises, sensations not like those at home. Some ideas, feelings, and impressions must be recorded immediately or they are lost; others are best recollected in tranquility (with a nod to Wordsworth).


Bethought: to think; to remind (oneself); to remember
Images and scenes bethought - evoking the moment and reliving it.
Why in the World? Where in the World?

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Bee Patrol

I swim slowly like an alligator
With just my eyes and snout above the water

A small perturbation
Ripples out from a bee

She miscalculated
can't lift off
and soon will drown

Wings and legs flailing
She swims in circles



I bring my hand up under her
a monstrous island
emerging from the sea

Rescued, she crawls
on the solid ground of my hand

I take her poolside
 and gently dump her on the coping

Wings glued to her body
she struggles forward, abdomen dragging
Leaving a small meander of water

She frees her abdomen from the water trail
And begins to groom
Six legs—all are employed
The first pair alternate and clean
antennae and eyes

The middle pair
stroke the thorax, drying the fine
hairs, unplastering the wings

The last pair
work the abdomen
scaling off the water

Finally, wings flex, whir
and she is gone

home

2 comments:

  1. Had I been there, she would have drowned. I'm allergic to bee stings. Had a bad one in a swimming pool.

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  2. Any old life raft -- even a stick of wood would serve the purpose... We need all the pollinators we can get. Thank you for the life-saving. Somehow, bees trapped by the water's micromolecular layer seem to know that they are being rescued by any helping hand; I have yet to be stung by taking the role of an emergent iland. [ref. Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions].

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