Advanced Beekeeper

I call my new beehives Athens, Lefkas, and Kalymnos.
Every time I go out to them with the smoker and veil
and that timeless spacesuit, I am going to Greece.
The bees don’t go on vacation. They work after dark. 
But opening the hives, I am going to lemons big
as lamps, divers pulling in sponges, jasmine petals
still bright by night, cicadas clicking their tongues.
In the scented voice of the queen, I hear Odysseus 
the bookseller play bouzouki in his shop and a boy
called Telemachus count to one hundred on the square.
Apricot trees reach into houses, worms move deeper
towards the core. Curtains fly taut from the windows
like sails. Only the brackish lake knows everyone’s secrets,
though the hairdresser comes closer each year. Cats complain
in the narrow alleyways, monks buy coffee and cigarettes 
to ward off the beauty they can hardly stand: lapis 
lazuli and turquoise beaches, girls dressed in veils 
for Pentecost, bougainvillea in the alleyway. I never 
imagined it could be like this, free as the chant 
drifting out from the monastery over the Ionian Sea, 
like fitting the Parthenon and all the Caryatids into one bee.