A cold extraction
from the sacred geometry of the combs,
my tongue released
into the essence of destinations, arrivals,
and a process bellowed smoke reveals
under the rooves of white weatherboards.
Taste this, I say, in your absence,
and I am prayerful,
despite the distracted presence
of a keeper and his son.
What I swallow is alive,
and applied to wounds
can be restorative, redolent
of the industry of gums
in the season of their flowering.
I love you, I do not say,
and turn from a netted man
and his village of imported queens
to smear a salve of honey
into the skin
on the undersides of my wrists.
When the man and his son have gone,
I taste myself, and return
to the place we have chosen -
a landscape hard-won and barren
of the constancy of love,
and I remember how we are measured
by what we do and say,
when no-one is watching, when alone.