Glass Apiary

On the hotel roof, the hives wake before the traffic, lifting their gold grammar into the pale blue hour. Each wingbeat tests the morning like a struck glass, and the sky answers with a thin, bright trembling.

Below them, avenues unroll their belts of heat, buses kneel, shutters rise, coffee exhales from doorways. The bees cross over scaffolds and satellite dishes as if the whole city were one enormous flower learning to open.

They return dusted in the yellow rumor of parks, of balcony herbs, of weeds splitting the grammar of stone. At the hive mouth, each body pauses, shining, then disappears into the dark republic of honey.

By noon the roof smells of wax and sun-warmed metal. I stand among chimneys and blinking antennas, hearing inside that wooden brightness the patient industry of sweetness being invented from noise.