Tony Hoagland

Tony Hoagland's most recent collection of poems, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, was published by Graywolf Press in February 2010. He is also the author of four other books of poetry, including What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Donkey Gospel, winner of the James Laughlin Award. Graywolf also published his Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft in 2006. He has received the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, the Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, and the O.B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson College low-residency M.F.A. Program.

To Move

like a bee through a meadow

from blossom to blossom visiting with one
then drifting casually across a space

to where another waits, wanting
to spread yourself around

wanting to touch every personal pronoun
from pulpit to synogogue from vestibule to choirloft

yet not wishing the petunia to notice
you circle the tall delphinium

or the hydrangea to see you enter
the deep flouncy petticoats of the gardenia

To be a bee. And love the sensation
of making a whole meadowfull

of flowers
dizzy

with pleasure,
rubbing them the right way

then the other
unworried about getting hibiscus

mixed up with larkspur,
whispering mimosa to crocus

To move like a bee
in beespace and beetime

more and more sticky with ore
adrift in the anesthesia

before romance had been invented
before we had been expelled from that place

all of us deep in the clover To be
a simple good-natured, single-syllable bee

speaking confidentially

unobtrusively slipping
deep into the fissure of an ear.