Honey At The Table

It fills you with the soft

essence of vanished flowers, it becomes

a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow

from the honey pot over the table

and out the door and over the ground,

and all the while it thickens,

grows deeper and wilder, edged

with pine boughs and wet boulders,

pawprints of bobcat and bear, until

deep in the forest you

shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,

you float into and swallow the dripping combs,

bits of the tree, crushed bees – – – a taste

composed of everything lost, in which everything lost is found.

-Mary Oliver