Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by a poet named David Russell Wagoner, David Wagoner.

He was born in 1926, and he is an American poet who has been nominated twice for the National Book Award.

He was the Chancellor of the Academy of

American Poets from 1978 to 1999. He even had a novel that was made into a movie by Francis

Ford Coppola of the Godfather fame. The poem that I'm going to read today is called

Falling Asleep in a Garden. It's another

good summer poem, I think. This is how it goes. All day the bees have come to the garden. They hover,

swivel in arcs and whirling, light on stamens heavy with pollen, probe and revel inside the yellow and red starbursts of dahlias,

"'or cling to Labelia's blue-white mouths,

"'or climb the speckled trumpets of foxgloves.

"'My restless eyes follow their restlessness

"'as they plunge bodily headfirst into treasure,

"'gold fevered among these horns of plenty.

They circle me, a flowerless patch with nothing to offer in the way of sweetness

or light against the first omens of evening. Some, even now, are dying at the end of their few

weeks, some being born in the dark, some simply waiting

for life, but some are dancing deep in their hives, telling the hungry, the sun will be that

way, the garden this far, this is the way to the garden.

They hum at my ear, and I wake up, startled, seeing the early stars beginning to bud in constellations.

The bees have gathered somewhere like petals closing for the coming of the cold.

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