What We'll Lose When We Lose The Bees

Not just the fruit of our fields of labor,
the weighted arbor, the blessed abundance of the earth.

Not just the winged alchemists, transmuting tirelessness into gold
season after season.

Not just the buzzing congregation, the heat of their gathered bodies,
expressing through dance their solemn and unshakable purpose.

When we lose the bees we will lose the devoutest of pilgrims,
who dusts her six feet on the doorsteps of a thousand fleeting cathedrals,

who casts faceted eyes over vaulted petals
before heading home in her lifelong chastity, bearing blessings for her sisters:

selfless, industrious, obedient,
all the religion man aspired to after the fall.

We'll lose the one who made the apple. The one who lives still in the garden
and has never drawn one breath in doubt.

John William Waterhouse, The Mermaid

Sometimes she wonders how it happened: her own creation, the birth of the creature doomed to live between. She sits on the warm rocks, the salt crusting on her skin, her tail slowly drying, combing and combing her long hair.

It was a sailor who taught her that, the combing. He saw her in the wake of the ship, a pale face in the paler foam, and stood transfixed while she hauled herself up a trailing line. Everyone thinks all the strength is in the tail, but that’s not true. If you had to pull yourself from water, your full dead weight unsupported by legs, you would have strong arms too.

So she pulled herself up, and she looked long at him, and he reached out to her with trembling fingers and ran them through her hair. A lifetime of tangling did not make this easy, but he was patient.  Those fingers, so clever with a twist of rope, unwound the knots and made the strands lie smooth and shining.

She stared with sea-blind eyes, at his hands, at his face, at the trembling pulse at his throat. She felt her scales drying slowly in the wind and heat, an uncomfortable pinching, even as the skin of her torso warmed and itched with the pleasure of dry heat.

Her hair once untangled, he ran those subtle fingers over her shoulder, down the small of her back. The fish in her recoiled and the hair of her warm arms stood up in delight, and she leaned in and kissed him, tasted the sweet wet of him with her salt mouth. And then she threaded her strong arms around him like a stand of seaweed and she slipped with him into the waiting waves.

The struggle was brief. He was a thing of air and sun, both of them the enemies of water, both of them quickly extinguished. Her lashing tail and his lashing legs churned the sea. Her eyes, wide in the murk, watched him clearly; watched him move from one element to another, become infused with salt water, heavy laden with it.

She kissed his newly salt mouth and let him slip down into the depths for the crabs to scuttle over, envying him a second time, the abandon with which mortals choose one world or the other. She, the one between, always knew that if she took him it could only be to let him go.

She kept his comb. On the shore near the blessed water, half of her longing for salt and half for sun, she runs it and runs it through her hair.