Every moment something changes. Even a vas on the sill can
acquire more dust in almost no time at all. Hammers beat like
hearts upon pieces of copper until they are smooth; then,
the beating stops. And
someone hangs a painting upon a wall as if it were the first
painting to be hung upon the first wall.
Have you ever been quiet enough to hear your life brushing
by you like a wind in your ears? It's frightening, and, I
suspect, addictive to some. Sailors. Some people have to hear
it, feel it, you know, to know that it is moving, going.
I have to write it. I try to write it. I want to map it out
like a doctor looking at an X-ray, trying to find the problem
so that she can prescribe the cure.
What about you? Do you have to feel it, smell it, see it?
Are you jealous of those who seem to float through their lives,
remarking on the changing color of a leaf as if it were just
what happens, and not what is happening? As if it weren't
happening to them, too?
A good friend of mine recently sent me an email in which she
mentioned that she'd just begun dating a beekeeper. I immediately
thought of Plath and her bee poems---"The Beekeeper's
Daughter," "The Swarm," and "The Bee Meeting,"
in particular. I also thought of Sexton's "Sylvia's Death,"
and the lines: "(Sylvia, Sylvia / where did you go /
after you wrote me / from Devonshire / about raising potatoes
/ and keeping bees?)"
I've always had a bit of "bee thing," I guess. My
mom's name is Brandy, and all my life, she collected little
bee knickknacks. I remember being very little and playing
with one of her beehive toys, which was complete with a variety
of bees, including a guardian bee that carried a tiny staff
with a point at the end.
My husband calls me "B" sometimes. A few good friends
do, too. To tell you the truth, I don't always like this.
I've never really had a nickname, and rather like it when
people who know me say my name, since they're some of the
only folks pronounce it correctly! My name's easy enough to
say, but the "n" and "m" in the middle
seem to trip people up in the beginning.
I'm actually afraid of bees. Once, when my friend Delane and
I went camping together in Colorado, we awoke to find that
we were in the middle of some kind of bee colony. There were
tons of them! They were buzzing all around our tent and supplies.
We ran screaming down a little gully, shaking our heads and
running our fingers through our hair, in case any of the flying
things had gotten caught there.
Years later, in Dallas, my husband and I found ourselves,
oddly enough, dealing regularly with a group of garden bees,
that, for some reason, would get caught in our window air-conditioning
unit, and then get spat out into our living room. Without
fail, they'd head straight towards the light on the ceiling,
and then hover against the fixture covering the light bulb
My thick old dictionary was always nearby, so it ended up
being our bee squasher. It's embarrassing to admit this, but
I probably killed close to a hundred bees with my dictionary
the summer we lived in that particular place! When we first
noticed the bees, I'd run into the other room and my husband
would have to deal with them. Later, it would be almost nothing
for me to pick up my dictionary and smash a bee's body gently
against the light. It wasn't a messy process, really. Squash,
toss out. Squash, toss out. We would have used a fly swatter,
but honestly, the dictionary worked much better.
I wonder what sort of karmic retribution I might be forced
to endure as a result of my being a murderer of bees for a
summer. Will someone come at me with a great bunch of words,
and before I know it, smash me against the light? I wonder...
Once, while strolling through Graceland Cemetery here in Chicago,
Kirk and I came across a dead bee in the cup of a flower.
We took a picture.
I remember being chased down the street by a bee when I was
a little girl. I remember vividly, looking back and seeing
the bee right behind me, and hearing its angry buzz.
I've never been stung by a bee, but once, as a teenager in
Texas, I stepped on a dead bee while walking barefoot through
a park. The bottom of my foot was red and sore for days.
Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz... Isn't that how the days go by,
here in the city? Maybe that's why we see less bees here than
we do in the country. They don't want to have to compete with
our buzzzy lives.
Looking through an old New
Yorker
today, I came across a lovely quote by Señor C that
I thought I'd share with you: "The best proof we have
that life is good, and therefore that there may perhaps be
a God after all, who has our welfare at heart, is that to
each of us, on the day we are born, comes the music of Johann
Sebastian Bach. It comes as a gift, unearned, unmerited, for
free."
Bronmin
"Something
it is which thou hast lost, / Some early pleasure from thine early
years. / Break thou deep vase of chilling tears, / That grief hath
shaken into frost!"
