Available Surfaces: Essays on Poesis

The Hive

20 The Hive They put the big gloves on my hands. They covered my head with the veil. They lit the necessary incense, and the aura of pine surrounded me. Everything we needed was abandoned there, like theater props left backstage after the play’s run ends. It was as though the Rapture had come, and the inhabitants of a world had suddenly disappeared, leaving behind not less than everything: I saw an arbour with a drooping roof Of trellis vines, and bells, and larger blooms, Like floral censers swinging light in air; Before its wreathed doorway, on a mound Of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits, Which, nearer seen, seem’d refuse of a meal By angel tasted or our Mother Eve; For empty shells were scattered on the grass, And grape stalks but half bare, and remnants more, Sweet smelling, whose pure kinds I could not know. Still was more plenty than the fabled horn Thrice emptied could pour forth, at banqueting For Proserpine return’d to her own fields, Where the white heifers low. Years later, when I read these lines from Keats’s “The Fall of Hyperion ,” the scene was familiar to me, curiously homelike for all its alien imagery and antiquated diction. But that was in the future. Now, my brother and my cousin were arraying me for the quest they had conceived for me. We were in an old shed on the family farm; it was full of the smell of dust and rotted wood, and another, overpoweringly sweet smell 21 that was not new to me but that I could not identify; shortly it would be forever etched in my olfactory brain: the perfume of beeswax. “He’s ready,” my cousin said to my brother, and then to me, “Out.” We left the dark shed and entered a perfect day in early June, late morning, sunlight filtered by the leaves of ancient oaks. The armor I was wearing smelled strange to me: mildew and dust and beeswax mixed. The canvas of the bee veil was stiff with disuse; I was wearing blinders. My cousin, from behind me, steered me by the shoulders. “Which one?” my brother said. “It don’t matter,” said my cousin. “This one here: the first one.” The old beehives stood abandoned in the grove, like neglected tenements, a failed housing project in an inner city that Homer would have understood. Some of the hives were empty. Some had abandoned boxes, whole floors of the high-­ rise gone dark. Others were fully occupied, almost as if they had been tended for the six or seven years that had passed since anyone had paid attention to them. It was toward one of these that my cousin steered me. “That’s the one right there,” he said, suddenly at some distance behind me. “Do it.” The hive in question was illuminated by a single shaft of sunlight that slipped in through the canopy of leaves high above me (a perfect cinematic set-­ up, O Muse of Memory). Its old white paint seemed suddenly blinding. I stood before it utterly strange to myself, like an image of a diver from my Classics Comics version of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The decrepit smoker in my hand leaked a little pine-­ fog. “Pump the smoker,” my brother said. He seemed to be a thousand miles away. This adventure was my cousin’s idea. He was, stated bluntly, a bully, and I was the primary target of his aggression, being young enough for him to dominate but old enough to be a challenge, unlike his own younger siblings. My brother was not a bully, but he was the B Male in this particular pack; he did not generally oppose my cousin’s will. Furthermore, the Teutonic genes in him, which were leading him toward a career as an engineer 22 even as they were nudging me to become a poet, made him interested in the inner workings of things. Just what was inside a beehive? How did the whole deal work? It had begun as a dare, which I took because I was defiant, obstinate, and stupid in the face of a challenge, especially from a bully. But as I stood there at the bottom of the grove’s ocean of shadow and light, all of that dropped away. The hive hummed, a mystery. It was my job to take...