For Other Bees Do Not Visit This Flower

I have very little doubt that if the whole genus of humble-bees became extinct in England, the heartsease and red clover would wholly disappear – Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1866

Some hearts fracture slowly, a small crack
in the muscle wall deepening over the years,

and the sound of breathing more like sobbing,
as though floodwaters were swamping the airways –

the storms are getting oftener and stronger,
their muster of names those of long-lost cousins

blowing home from overseas, bringing gifts
of biblical proportions and rattling with stories;

we hunch inside our skins, trying not to listen.
But old houses are porous, on a winter’s evening

you can smell the smoke of other people’s fires
through the depleted walls, like bad news drifting in,

a waft of paranoia. Then something we should not
have said flies out of our mouths, a dead word

like bumblebee or heart’s-ease. In the small hours
in flowerless chambers the planet trembles.