(after the photograph by Dominique Thiébaut)

In a Cezanne dream, Tess lingers on the path.
Queen Anne’s lace flocks around her.

Aix-en-Provence extends its borders
to include the New World, and she is its dark lustrous focus,

the purply floret at the center of the lace where a drop
of womanly blood stained an entire species of plant for eternity.

Anne, she of miscarriage and rabbits–how powerful still her blood
and the memory of her virile angry failures.

What will be the lasting impact of Tess’s trip up the hill,
her ascent toward the one remaining tree at the crown

and the glorious view of mountains and mountains and mountains?

Sara Eddy’s chapbook of poems about bees and beekeeping, Tell the Bees, was released in October of 2019 by A3 Press. Another chapbook of her poems, Full Mouth, was published by Finishing Line Press in November 2020. She is Assistant Director of the writing center at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and lives in nearby Amherst with a teenager, a black cat, a white dog, and three beehives.