Bios Absconditus

After the bees fled, birds followed.
People forgot how to do what the birds and the bees do.

We lost nest-knowledge, hive-knowledge; all eggs except Fabergé
and honey that wasn’t sweet talk disappeared. Ants left;

good riddance some said to the fire ants, but wherefore art thou
to the sugar kind, annoying though they were at times –

no trails of collective labor on our countertops,
no dynamic dotted lines on plaid to animate our picnics.

Someone tried to stroke her cat and cut her hand on cardboard:
a decoy, deployed how many hours since the feline went fugitive?

Dogs: taxonomic, glass-eyed, cold to all offers
of walks in the park or cheese-flavored treats.

Stables, barnyards, zoos, even the sewers where rats swam
in our filth – all fled; and the wilds,

quiet as an after-hours shopping mall. How could earth
be earth without insect, fowl, amphibian or furry four-legs?

The film had jammed in the projector; the flow of life no longer flowed.
An ark, a fleet of arks on auto-pilot had invaded;

creation was decreated, and consciousness, the human ray,
the flashlight into cosmic darkness: flailing and purposeless

without our companions. We fondled field guides, bestiaries, fables;
forgot which brutes had been real and which imagined;

mascots, manuals, and constellations, our only comfort and consolation.

*

Origins: first, I read a poem this morning by Tom Healy called "Beekeeper," in his collection What the Right Hand Knows What the Right Hand Knows (Four Way Books, 2009) which itself seemed to have its start in reports of the disappearance of bees (Colony Collapse Disorder). Second, I have always liked "slippery slope" poems, or poems that start with a concept and then mainly extend it toward the point of absurdity or collapse: Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" is a classic example, but my favorite is Derek Mahon's "Matthew V. 29 - 30."

From there, I found myself working, as I have lately, with tight consonance and heavy alliteration; the inventions of imagery and idea came, at least as I observed myself writing, directly from the sound symbolism.

The title: continuing, indirectly I suppose, with my meditations on agnosticism: a play on Deus absconditus, of course.