Yellow

Wade Tregaskis, "Honeybee in a Trombetta Squash flower," 2015

Buttercup, let’s talk. In your saffron-robed wisdom, you
understand the way we apes pile on the meaning. One
end of the spectrum: Giotto painting old Judas Iscariot
in a yellow cloak (not golden nor sunlit, but piss-colored,
draped in fear-stain shame). At another end: Van Gogh’s
butter-colored rent house, his sunflowers, all purest joy.
And that’s just the West. East, past Jerusalem, even past
Mecca, further than Bodhidharma wandered, near the
Yellow River, sits the Yellow Emperor, resplendent. One
might even enter Yellow Springs, converse with all those
dead sitting there in the jaundiced light of an everlasting
eclipse of the sun, weak illumination a sulfured glaze on
on their desiccated fingers, their game boards and tiles.
Or not. The bees don’t care, long as their dead reckoning
dance leads them to your honeyed bulls-eye, Buttercup.