Paper Wasp Nest on My Birthday

Art is an instrument  in war…
Picasso

A long time ago, I held one in a box, not a shoe box, 
but something else square and sturdy enough to carry into time 

the fragile mulching of a horde of wasps, not stingers, 
but paper wasps that still fill the dark corners of my childhood 

barns with beautiful lamps that do not light 
but simmer in the shadows like want and abundance. 

This one attaches to a tree by the far riverbank 
where I have lived now forty years far from that Ohio; 

this paper wasp nest floats like a tawdry balloon 
over the river’s insistent construction and the occasional heron 

stealing like a rock into the moment, head down, 
all bent toward the silence. I want it to fall; 

I want winter to steal in, to cover with white beauty 
the paper mulch of wasps, to send it floating down 

to the winter husks of grass, yellow mustard, deer-bent, 
where it will catch on a seed, where the wind and snow 

will thrash into the earth, stamp it into the spring’s rising 
many months from now, months I count and count, 

each one I know a lessening of the life I have fallen, despite
everything, so in love with and so snap to a picture frame 

what I can hold in my hands and breathe my breath upon.