Sailor Bees

It was Sunday. The bees paid no heed. They rolled in the pollen of my rose-of-sharon, in muskmelon blooms and the bright gold stars of cucumbers-to-be -- the worker worthy of his hire observing a sacred truce where I played alongside. Slender tendrils in green and yellow probe the air for a hold or fall humbly to the dust of earth. I am the tucker, tucking the suckers back into the metal matrix, the eight-gauge lattice that lets cucumber and cantaloupe ascend a melon stairway to heaven. Pole beans like it, too. Even tomatoes bend a little to my will and warp to its weft. They form woven walls on either side of my garden, a living hull with outrigger potato beds to starboard and strawberries to port. We sail with bees in the rigging, east to west in the solar sea.