Honeybee (4 page)

Sometimes in the mornings
a sense of knowing tickles my windows,

 

mechanical thud outside,
gears shifting, engine waking up

 

like a bee doing its waggle dance
in front of the hive.

 

Even if I don't know what that yellow machine
means, exactly, it companions me.

 

Man in a bucket, examining high light,
repairing wires nibbled by a squirrel.

 

The world's at work in the hopeful hour,
things put together

 

won't be blown apart,
dissolve or disappear.

 

Did you know bees ventilate their homes
by hovering outside and fanning their wings?

 

Light passes through thinking,
helps us find the field again.

When did your language spring alive? At two, single words chipped awake, precious gems in the cave of the holy mouth.
Pajama
could hypnotize. I lay on the grass beneath the clothesline's flapping pajama pants singing sweet three-buttoned glory, a nectar in the remembering and repeating, till lost in bliss.
Like a swoon in a flower, basking, collecting
…Someone nodded, responded, recognizing the fat little bee-body of syllable,
yes, yes, she said it, did you hear what she said?
Words and voices, hovering, dipping down…how few people we know in the beginning. Parents, grandparents, vegetable man, the woman called Caroline at the farm up the hill, pronounced like “line”—
a clothesline in her name.
Big blue-jean pants were strung on it, no flowery aprons. She sold strawberries in little pint boxes, shooed chickens, arranged zucchini by size. She said she didn't love the farm, though, didn't even love vegetables, she only loved the man who loved it.
Wrap a word in another word
…so she lived with him and worked the ruddy acres, in the steaming heat. Heat felt pointed in those days—it had a nose on it. Things would be made clearer as years went by—the level of irony one voice can contain. Sometimes, the voices around you were voices
in your conscience.
Does it sound like anyone you know or is it only yourself?
Caroline's odd frank voice was one of mine. It never dressed up. It told things directly, beat-down hoe to a clump of earth.
Humph!
She bent over in muggy field laboring hard under sun till she couldn't stand up straight anymore, and of course her farmer husband died first and left her with the acres. Insult upon injury. Now what? By then you're devoted to the system, you can't just move. Tangle of blackberry vines, ruin of beautiful barns, battered crates, fourteen cats, ripe compost, and the white delivery truck with
ORGANIC
rusting off the side.

 

Fifty years later her fields are overgrown except the one in which a man from down the block is growing pumpkins and sometimes I fly over them. I look down past the ragged line of trees just beyond the airport and see them, rumpled, marked with the lines of old crops and weeds. And the tears roll out of my eyes streaking the inside of the airplane window. I still call her on Sundays sometimes to say, “What's up? Is anything up?” which is really strange if you've been doing it so long and especially if you're calling someone on a farm.
Usually she says, “Not a thing.” Then tells me some disappeared cat or barking dog story. But one day she says, “You know what? Everything was
so
dry this year that the poor honeybees were drinking water out of the cats' water bowls under the chins of the cats. Can you imagine? I never even knew bees drank water, I thought they just drank flower juice. How desperate they must have been! Sneaking in under the big tongues and teeth of the cats like that?”

Because the person behind me on the plane kept kicking my seat, across the long striped blue/brown geological wonder of Colorado to California, I turned around to stare at her finally through the crack and somehow pulled a muscle in my leg. How someone can strain a leg muscle while not even standing up beats me. But it definitely follows the usual pattern of getting hurt when we are rushing, jostled, distracted, mindless, otherwise off the beam. I was distracted in the plane. Trying to read a book and bumping. (Last summer I broke my little toe while running to answer a telephone on the eve of leaving to Scotland—a hiking tour became a hobbling tour in one swift second. A hammer once fell on my head off the top of a ladder when I was planning a small person's birthday party.
Jostled, distracted
…)

 

Pay attention
takes on new meanings out in the world.

 

Honeybees have been hauled all over agricultural creation by their owners in wooden hives to pollinate flowers far from the ones they grew up with. Even if they only grew up a little while ago. Honeybees live and
dive and drink in the same fields where poisons are sprayed. To escape decline for any time at all would seem like a miracle. Incidentally, to call a time in history a “time of war” when there would not have been a war if you did not make one seems somehow disingenuous—it was hardly inevitable, as a severe thunderstorm might be. Bees are fine in severe thunderstorms, apparently. Could the bees with their profound radar beams and personal sensitivities be mirroring the disarray in the world of humans? Watch your step. Mind your head. A news story about movies for last season announced proudly, “
HORROR
/
SLASHER FLICKS TO FILL YOUR SCREENS
.”

always going somewhere else. What is this peculiar attribute of our households, our days, our nation? We will not be here long enough to get tired of it. Does this make us less responsible? It's that relationship you have with a
towel
when the towel belongs to a
hotel.

 

If we can't go anywhere else, are we more encouraged to enhance and protect the place where we are? Hmmmmm. Bzzzzzzz.

 

We should do all we can to stay out of jail, but now and then it is quite uplifting to pretend we are under house arrest.

 

I heard, if you spend less time at work (does this apply to school, too?) you do better work while there. Concentrated bursts enhance performance. Drop all the prefacing and wrap-up, and more gets done.

 

The frogs under the bridge in the Cairo park after dark had the best singing voices I have ever heard with frogs. They were not on tour. They sang that way every night, on the rim of the great city, its fabulously
jumbled markets and shining domed mosques. The frogs were harmonizing, resonating so loudly you could feel a multi-layered frog chorus through your feet as well as your ears. Took a minute to realize it was frogs. It could have been buried bulldozers. With really well-oiled engines…I was still carrying my South African sugar packet with wisdom printed on it, “From contentment with little comes happiness.”

 

In the old days, honeybees found their own pastures and meadows, clumps and clots of pollen. In the new days, their hives were carted by farmers here and there, intentionally. The bees were
rented out.
How this affected their stability and general constitutions may only now be emerging with the sudden total disappearance (no corpses) of a large number of honeybees in the world. I mean, if you get
rented out
, what does that do to your willpower? If you get
carted around
, what does that do to your radar?

 

I know people who, the minute they get into their homes, tell you where they are going next.

I am one of them.

 

This is nothing to be proud of.

 

I am trying something out.
Where are you going?

Nowhere, nowhere at all.

It feels like an aberration.

But a certain calm descends upon the house.

 

One evening, after remembering there used to be a lovely thing in the sky called a “sunset,” I trundled to my front porch, sat on the top step with an icy glass of freshly squeezed limeade, some crushed mint leaves thrown in for good luck, and waited. The western sky rumpled and heaved, brewing elegantly, turning over, graying and pinking all at once. Maybe it was too cloudy for a sunset. Cars rolled past, going home from work. What a comforting, sometimes lonely hour.

 

Streaks of red shot out from behind the gray rumples. My neighbor walked past with her dog. “What's wrong?” she called. I said, “What? Nothing.” She said, “Why are you sitting there like that?” I pointed at
the sky. She looked at it and shrugged. “Oh. You look locked out.”

 

So ask yourself, you swirling tornado of a human being, in a world of disoriented honeybees, do you want to look locked out the minute you sit down?

I ask you.

Her e-mail message asked me please to write a two-or three-page essay on one of my poems. She would pick the poem. Then she said, “Please do your best work—this is half of my grade.”

 

I kid you not. And she was a community college student, not a child.

 

We cannot begin to count our friends and helpers. Although I did not turn out to be her helper after all (hadn't I written the poems already and wasn't that
my
part of the homework?), I have no doubt she enlisted someone else. She had that air and
tone.
Some drones are so lazy they lie around in the beehive all day waiting for another bee to feed them. Passage of mind from thought to thought. Crevices of honeycomb stroked with sweetness.
Zip zip how long can we hover in any one zone?
The zen abbot suggested we try to
drop our inner commentary
as we took a hike up the hill to the memorial ashes site of Suzuki Roshi. Oh, but how deliciously and tenaciously the chatter stuck to the inner tiers of our brains. Later, meditating on a pillow, I absorbed the swishing of latecomers, the snuffling and sneezing of
the sitter two pillows down, as hard as I tried to ignore them. (Why do people with colds always sit near me?) Buses on the street made heavy braking sounds at corners, but back in the mind's hive, chips and glimmers of language and emptiness sashayed gracefully side to side.

All the theories about the disappearing bees omit one possibility: they are sick of the word “busy.” They are on strike. Sure this cycling and collecting and producing is what they've done for so long…worker and queen and drone…blossom and hive and comb…but the last thing the bees want stuck in their pollen baskets is a cliché. Busy? Not I. We can't even know if they adore the fragrances of flowers…but they must, right? Let's hope so. Let's hope there's pleasure in it.

 

In France, some teenagers asked me, “Is it true, in your country, students don't take time to sit down and drink tea and eat pie upon return from school?”

 

Eat pie?
This was hard to answer.

 

“I hope they eat pie,” I said. “We all need pie.” Then I started looking for a restaurant that served pie.

 

Down the street from my Texas home is one of those discount bread stores that sells 8-10 packaged pies for a dollar.
Cherry, coconut, apple
,
pecan.
They scare me. Pie should not be that cheap.

In England, the glossy catalogue tucked free inside the Sunday
Guardian
advertised, on one spread, products to help with the following problems: anti-frost mat, anti-mould mat, ultrasonic cat repeller, bark control collar, and mole chaser. I have to admit, none of these are things I have worried much about in my life, except maybe mould, spelled mold in the USA. But I have not worried about it inside my refrigerator, which is where the anti-mould mat is meant to be placed.

 

There are people we have never seen who are busy thinking up things we should be worried about.

 

How may we all be restored? Poor busy bee, wind down, wind down. “On average, one out of every four mouthfuls we eat or drink comes from plants that benefit from the services of a pollinator,” says biologist Matthew Shepherd.

 

Watch us humans as we enter our rooms, remove our shoes and watches, and stretch out on the bed with a single good book. It's the honey of the mind time. Light shines through our little jars.