This morning a wasp’s nest kept me from my breakfast,
a nest the size of a fist, or a small heart, chambered and dark,
growing stingers stuck to the shadow of the porch near the door.
My narrow definition of today did not include this time
to study the holes the velvet ants are filling with their bodies,
or their new wings planted in the jail-space of each small cell.
But now I want to see each tiny hair on their thorax and abdomens,
their compound eyes, and hear the long dry bread of their silent breathing.
Sometime this spring while I was in the garden, the queen’s spit mixed
with the edges of my plants to form a dull brown cradle for the eggs.
Here it is September and I was tormented by the summer
streaking past my window, unable to stop watching the remnant
of what was left: the jackrabbits, lizards, the hummingbirds.
This colony, maybe several thousand growing paper wasps,
and my stomach is broken and shuddering, but every day I will have to look,
to enter the rising cold to watch the sweet secretions
and the growing umbrella of their combs.
One day when I open the door, the rose-pink globe of earth
will be washed with the new wasps, their jointed bodies
entering the air in a sudden arc. I wonder
if I will be able to do the things I have decided to do that day, or
if I will have to sit on the porch in my winter coat and slippers
waving them off as they leave.