There’s a sweat bee in the faded poppies
at the old Texaco outside Decatur. She’s rolling
in pollen with her honey-striped sisters, legs kicking
like a dog does when you find that One Good Spot.
She looks more like a gem than I
expected, even powdered in flower dust.
You say you didn’t know bees could be hairless
and tell me that Bonnie and Clyde stayed
a night in the three-room motel
made of petrified wood. I press my face
to the time-warped glass and wonder
if there was more romance in a small room
back then, if the windows were this filthy
when they stopped through. Maybe it was enough
just to be there together. The grass off the lake
is studded with flowers I’ve never seen and don’t know
the names of. Somebody left a few crumpled
cans of root-beer and the fixings for s’mores
in a fire pit fifteen feet from the shore. It’s somehow
more obscene than if they’d shattered a bottle of vodka
and left the shards bedazzling the gravel.
You bend to dig something shiny out of the dirt
along the walking path. I ask if it’s a penny.
You turn and smile—No. A lucky battery. There’s a tree
you’d like to introduce me to, a tall red oak
that looks made for climbing. I try to pull myself up.
My grip slips in a shower of bark. His nearest brother
couldn’t be bothered to split beyond a solitary branch,
reaching out to tangle in your oak tree’s canopy
like he couldn’t bear to grow alone. We don’t
find the forgotten well but there are deer tracks
in the creek bed and places where enough
of the scrub has scraped away to show
the bones of a long dead sea. There’s a bird
sitting on a stump in the middle of an empty field
and I only have to say Hey, look before you
pull the car off to the trailside for a better view. I take
a picture and you tell me it’s a split-tail.
I repeat the distinction to my father later and he says,
Maybe. They’re not very common and then,
Well I’ll be damned when the picture comes through.
I’m two for two on spotting rare birds, it seems. I don’t
know how to tell him that the only reason I find them
is because I’m never really looking.