Black and polished
with light, it treads the air
beneath the arched soffits
of our house, where

this morning I smeared,
with a clean metal blade,
a dollop of putty
over the bullet-sized hole
it bore into the wood.

I watched, for an hour
that bee, tap-tap-tapping
like the severed tip
of a cane groping
after what was lost, and

like that, I saw again
the frostbitten toe
the medics let thaw,
then amputated as I slept
through a gauze

of morphine. The charred
and inconsolable knuckle
that would, for years, try,
each night in my dreams,
to come home from the war.