PAULA MILLIGAN | |
Paula Milligan lives in Seattle and is a frequent contributor to Bellowing Ark, where several of these poems appeared. BEE CONTENT
Air
Curious bees pause, touch the hair of my unshorn legs, lick the salt I can give them, walk my skin
until I shiver. They leave their sisters to guard the hive and cool bodies cover me until I become the color
of sepia grandmothers. They swirl the dark smell of honey, whisper of Egyptian tunnels,
Athenian caves, touch me until I am the color of respiration, and heaven is seen through the wing of a bee.
Invocation
I would close my eyes and see the beginning—light I can only call white—it is just the light—
or it is blue of Mary’s robes. Listen for the whisper, rhythm of respiration, breath of God.
I would open my eyes, see honeybees at the gate to their upright house, where they wait
for the rain to stop. Tufts of fur left by years of cats’ passing through the doorway, light
of the sun on lupine leaves and grass in that moment when clouds part. I hear
the song of the robin in her tree, bumbling of bees’ search for nectar in sage blossoms.
I would touch the rain on my face and know it is holy. I would open the door and step through.
After Equinox
Sophia slips between stalks of drowsing cornsilk, her veil the undulations of bees’ wings splashing sunlight. She whispers of time, shows the years swelling—waves grown immense before they crest and spill on sand, fold into sighs. She laughs at those who fear the blade that cuts the thread. Short or long, no matter, she says. Best to stuff green spikes of rosemary, crumble in wax that once held larval bees and honey, wrap your yarn around other peculiar strands you encounter. This amuses the spinner; she can only use the fibers you bring. The corn sheds its silk, wraps tough skin around its young. She offers the threads.
Beesong
Sometimes the queen pipes, they say, a strange Pan in a box, or a tree . Not for distress, only making sound, she who is swollen with legions of eggs, will live on wax cells until she runs dry, and a new queen supplants. Maybe she calls that primordial bee, wisdom she must learn herself. Or sings; her daughters have made apartments for the tiny eggs, plenty of room to grow. She sings the song that drew the warrior to the fire. The song’s language is unimportant. It’s the meaning.
Tilt
The sun rises later now—it has been a summer full of ripe tomatoes, so sweet they are nearly confections, perfect pole beans, a tumble of sunflowers, fireweed. The bees know light’s language, they shore their stocks for winter, place extra guard to mind the stores of honey, its scent so heavy that even in moonlight, the air is full with its ripeness. They know what they soon must do—as do the hornets, hungrily patrolling below. They are tired, the bees. One who came home yesterday stopped to rest, her sisters pausing as they passed and passed, and she, nearly home, waited. The others were patient, and in the evening, when they were certain, they cast her body to the ground for scavengers. Soon it will be time to turn the drones out. The hornets wait for it. Drones who never mated and so did not die this summer. They will only deplete the winter hive, and must be cast away. Not just now; there is yet hope for a mating flight, nectar to be gleaned from purple oregano blooms, and the sisters enjoy the jocularity of the big, blunt boys. They will feed them for now, share the honey. Even in a brutal world, there is some measure of mercy.
Dear Jacquie, Because You Asked About Bees
I don’t really talk about the bees with strangers. I think of them the way I think of faith—you know, that kind of faith so deep and personal it fills you with certitude, and you just don’t want to tell any but your closest friends. Like when God talks to you, but if you mention it, the power goes slack, and people say you’re delusional and need counseling. But I know that’s not your way, and you wanted to know, so I’ll try to tell you about them: the translucence as they begin to stir
on summer mornings, thousands of tiny flecks of ancient amber come to life, about the smell of honey and wax as I sit next to the boxes I built to hold their comb, to house them. About propolis, the resin they excrete—brown and thick, hard, and strong enough to fortify the walls against slashing wind and rain. They say bees can seal a dead mouse at the bottom of the hive tight enough with propolis, the smell of decay won’t ever escape. How can I tell you
the smell of propolis? Wild and fruity, musky— something like humus, but nothing like humus. I have a colony on the back porch, and I sit on the step some warm Sunday mornings and breathe them, wonder on the odor which is like nothing else, hear the zeees as they depart, watch them flash straight up above the rooflines, then cut south, or west, or spiral away to a day of forage. And the early risers come home, hip pockets stuffed with bright pollen they will mix with nectar and honey to make the bee bread
that nourishes the brood becoming larval in hundreds of wax cells. Did I tell you about the time in July when two bees escorted a yellowjacket out by the shoulders? Each bee had him by a wing, and they resembled bar bouncers hustling out a drunk. The raider shook like a dog just bathed, then flew straight away. The queen’s daughters can be brutal. I’ve seen the legs strewn on boards after fights, when bees from other colonies steal in and try to take the honey for their own. I’ve watched crippled drones
flail in the grass. Born without a thorax, they are pulled from birthing cells and dragged out, the imperfect male left in the grass for yellowjackets to gnaw bits of him until he is dead, and I have stepped on them all, three yellow jackets and deformed bee, because the yellowjackets return to raid in the fall, and the ejected bee will die anyway. They’re all children of the queen, the once promiscuous queen, who mated with as many drones as she could for a day or two, and then, sated, held their seeds
for eggs she would lay, hundreds a day, for the rest of her life. The colony becomes an entity, a consciousness, each bee a part of the whole, each a cell in the body that lives to protect the queen, the mother’s discrete pheromone binding them like strands of a helix. From the moment of birth, a worker bee fulfills the duty prescribed by the moment elapsed: clean the cells, learn to fly, hunt and gather and feed the young, make cells to fill with nectar that the many will heat
to ripeness, then seal to store the golden food for the society, each bee a cell in the body. I am reminded of shorebirds, the thirty thousand dunlings we saw sweep across the Sound as a single body, rise as one to the sky as if in praise, each bird connected to the same spirit, finial beak to final tail, each wing knowing the next turn, each body taking its place to trace the form they would assume, each knowing the dance. We watched for an hour, or not—time and joy live on different planes—
as they formed and reformed the shapes: veil or flag, or pyramid. I knew it for dance like I know about bees, or turtles playing chase in the water. The way I feel the mitochondria my mother has passed to me from her mother, breath of great grandmothers before Lascaux. This is what I like about bees, these bits of the universal mind, clustered around the Mother as the ancients surrounded the Venus of Willendorf.
I have put them to bed for the year, left them a rack of honey to see them through. Still, on the warm October days, they search for flowers, come home with fat lumps of pollen to nourish the brood their mother will begin at equinox.
Far Fields
I should have left her there, cradled in the pink Sweet William petal, waiting, I now see, for Morpheus. A honeybee, of course, knows no metaphor, only duties directed by instinct. The struggle free of the wax cell that contained her from egg to pupa to white larva to worker, born to clean her own cell, then help to feed and nurture other nascent worker bees, spend the remaining three weeks of her life foraging, dawn to dusk, for pollen and nectar. In her life she will gather drops of nectar, joined with drops the others will collect, heat with their clustered bodies, and cap with wax they create. As field bee, she will work, fly sometimes miles from the hive until her wings have shredded.
When a friend of Grandmother’s died, my mother expressed surprise— she was so young, Mom said. Maybe she was just tired, Grandmother said. Not long after that, when her own heart stopped its work, she tore the wires from her chest and arms, wires that might have made her life longer, or made it seem longer. Sometimes, lessons like that return to the consciousness too late to help.
I picked the bee up, let her rest in the cup of my hand. She twitched a little, so I gathered the warmest air from the depths of my lungs and let it surround her without blowing directly. She took a step, then another. I cradled her as I took her to the back yard, placed her at the entrance to the hive, but she did not seem joyous to return to her home. She walked until she fell to the step below, then stopped moving I had forgotten that when bees know they are ready to die, they travel far from the colony, like elephants heading to the dying field.
I wish I had left her there, in the small pink petal, cushioned as she waited for rest.
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