If half of happiness is genetics,
What consolation there is in knowing
That some bees, now, prefer sex with orchids
That have evolved to irresistible.
Because bitterness ascends each evening
Like the moon.  Because the leaves of house plants
Are dusted with fear as we tend to them.
Because we believed, once, that they adored
Our songs, that they and our unborn children
Were happier hearing those melodies.
Now my student, nineteen, says she’s been raped;
Yours, eleven, is pregnant, yet we live
In an envied place.  Now epidemics
Of hive death have struck, local beekeepers
Repeating pollution and pesticides,
Proliferation of cell phone towers.
A white whale, nonfiction, has been sighted;
White rain has fallen on New Mexico.
In the museum we visited today, 
A history of our sick presidents,
Their doctors and their treatments—pneumonia,
Ileitis, cancer, stroke. And what’s more—
Bright’s and Addison’s Disease, depressions,
Their recoveries, deaths, and even so,
We were in Philadelphia, minutes
From the Liberty Bell and the tourists
Who travel here because we’ve muddled through
The way our early presidents came back
From bleeding a pint or more for fevers.
At last, when we looked at a killer’s skull,
When we examined his brain in fluid,
I told you about the Nazi doctors
Who searched the brains of four hundred children
They had murdered to discover their dreams,
And you said “impossible” like a child.
Listen, butterflies and moths remember
Their lives as caterpillars, the hunger
And the constant dream of flight.  Honeybees
Can recognize a face.  Margaret Bell
Owned bees that flew five miles to mourn her death,
Gathering near her house for an hour.
If, as scientists tell us, most women
Are happier than men until they turn
Sadder at forty-eight, then here, writing now
Past sixty, I must believe my darkness
Is nothing like the midnight you suffer.
Someone, now, has made the blackest substance
Ever known, worse than the blind-dark of caves.
The world’s dirt is disappearing faster
Than ever before.  “Gary, just you wait,”
My mother promised me ten thousand times,
And I did until this moment, saying
That I’ve woken, love, to some happiness
All forty years in this bed beside you.