Adventure in the Clover or Today’s Destruction, Averted
Adventure in the clover
cleaving the hours
& the bees on a lawn
thus far immune
to a fungus elsewhere
killing them.
Why write music
anymore why
have a family
the composer
unmade the world
in advance
of its predicted end.
We cannot bear
his suspension
which only the careless
robins resolve and a low
drone of bees
whose venturing patterns
the lawn into
a sociable hum.
Tomorrow’s disaster
is always here.
You refuse
to see it stop
it. J’accuse.
Meanwhile
there were these
bees’ dumb glory
a cunning weave
and clover’d
dance to a hive
that persists
unmolested
by bears in a neighbor’s
unseen field.
About Maureen N. McLane
Maureen N. McLane is the author of World Enough: poems (FSG, 2010) and Same Life: poems (FSG, 2008), and two books on British romantic poetry and culture, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (2008) and Romanticism and the Human Sciences (2000), both from Cambridge University Press. An Associate Professor of English at NYU, she has published essays on poetry, fiction, teaching, and sexuality in The New York Times, Boston Review, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and many other venues. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing, she is currently a contributing editor at Boston Review. She has been a MacDowell Fellow in 2009, 2010, and 2011. Her book, My Poets, is forthcoming from FSG in 2012. You can read Robyn Creswell’s interview with Maureen McLane at The Paris Review website.
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“Adventure in the Clover or Today’s Destruction, Averted” © Maureen McLane. Printed with permission by the author. This poem was originally published on Gwarlingo on August 21, 2011.


























































































Wow, I like that. She has a light touch, yet manages to conjure up a sense of surrounding disaster.