bees, bedbugs, and process of making gold

S E C O N D   D I D A C T I C   P O E M

The honey of man is
the task we're set to:     to be
'more ourselves'
in the making:
                       'bees of the invisible' working
in cells of flesh and psyche,
filling
          'la grande ruche d'or.'
Nectar,
            the makings of the
incorruptible,
                     is carried upon the
corrupt tongues of
mortal insects,
fanned with the wisps of wing
                   'to evaporate
excess water,'
                    enclosed and capped
with wax, the excretion
of bees' abdominal glands.
Beespittle, droppings, hairs
of beefur: all become honey.
Virulent micro-organisms cannot
survive in honey.
                             The taste
the odor of honey:
each has no analogue but itself.

In our gathering, in our containing, in our
working, active within ourselves,
slowly the pale
dew-beads of light
lapped up from flowers
can thicken,
darken to gold:

honey of the human.

--Denise Levertov

* * *

I am eating a ripe nectarine and the baby inside me is kicking. I am sitting at my desk, sunlight falling across my left shoulder and onto my glass paperweight, and I feel at peace: all my gathering and containing might thicken to gold after all. Which, considering the panic I viewed the world with yesterday when it first occurred to me that we might have a bedbug problem, is considerable. We still very well may have a bedbug problem, and I am waiting for the guy with the dog to call back. It's the standard way to detect bedbugs in NYC--you pay $300 for a guy with a trained canine to come, and the to dog sniffs them out with 95% accuracy. At our old condo building near Central Park there was a tenant with bedbugs and a cute beagle named Russell came and declared our apartment free and clear. Of course, at our old condo building we didn't have to pay anything, the management company took care of it and made sure no one in the building had bedbugs. Yesterday I was longing for that building, with its new wood floors, smooth walls, and general lack of bugs. I can't remember ever seeing a bug there. Here it's another story.

Ever since the lady who lived above us moved out and construction began, our apartment has been overrun with bugs. Ladybugs swarm our living room floor lamp. I killed a worm larvae inching across our bed yesterday. The night before I had Charles kill a mammoth flying beetle that appeared in my office. Let's not mention that scouting roaches that have appeared (and only a month ago I paid a roach exterminator.) And then, over the weekend, Ike began sporting a number of patches of bites on his arms and legs. Yesterday it occurred to me that these might not be mosquito bites he got at the park. He went to sleep with two bites and woke up with five more. I searched his room for a spider to no avail. Then I looked at photos of bedbug bites online. A perfect match. Ughhh. My lovely pre-war three-bedroom with river views went from being a haven to a hellhole filled with blood-sucking baby biters.  I was suddenly very itchy.

Charles is not happy either, primarily because treating a bedbug infestation can be very expensive: at least $1000, not including all the washing and dry cleaning to be done. Alba and I stripped all the bedding in Ike's room yesterday and moved the bed, and this morning he woke up without any new bites. But I am still waiting for the dog guy to call. Meanwhile the pounding goes on upstairs, opening up little cracks along the seams of our walls, accompanied by the sound of plaster and Lord-knows-what-else tumbling down inside them. Sending all the little creatures down to us.

I have been feeling industrious lately. Perhaps the nesting instinct combined with the effects of reading Kristin Lavansdatter, set in fourteenth century Norway. Kristin is always sewing, weaving, spinning, or brewing ale. After reading about hot steaming bowls of porridge for the 30th time, I went to the kitchen and made some. Yesterday I filled the house with pitchers of water when the plumbing was turned off due the construction, and it felt almost like a treat not to have running water. Of course, Kristen might have had bedbugs along with the maggots in her straw bedding and that doesn't sound like a treat. Nor did the excruciating birth of her first son, where the men milling about waiting kept referring to her likely death.

But nevermind. I am thinking more along the lines of sewing some curtains with an electric sewing machine I'll buy on e-bay. Maybe making some throw pillows--or at most industrious--a little dress for the new baby out of material from the expensive shirt that Charles accidentally tore this weekend. Lord knows I think it's a grave hardship that I don't have a dishwasher or a washer and dryer in my apartment, I can't imagine having to spin, dye, weave and then sew all my own clothes.

Which brings me back to the poem above, about the task we're set to. To create--and to make ourselves "more ourselves" in the process--what is sweet, fragrant, and thick from all the minute gatherings of life. Lapping up from among the little things, making dinner or washing the dishes by hand, the dew-drops of light. "Active in ourselves" which reminds me of the Theotokos, and she kept all these things, pondering them in her heart, and turning them into gold.

{ p o e t r y  w e d n e s d a y }

old hands

I N T R U S I O N

After I had cut off my hands
and grown new ones

something my former hands had longed for
came and asked to be rocked.

After my plucked out eyes
had withered, and new ones grown

something my former eyes had wept for
came asking to be pitied.

–Denise Levertov 

*   *   * 


I drove up to the seminary today. The campus smelled of the pine trees baking in the heat, of dry grass and, subtly, of Troublesome Brook. I know the smell of that place. I know the smell of the building where I worked for ten years, its damp basement, the smell of the cracked linoleum stairs in summer and of the sheepishly bearded students lingering in the entryway in winter. I know the smell of the copper beech tree under which the chapel bells are rung, and the smell of the concrete step behind the classroom where I used to attempt private phone conversations. The tired appearance of each as familiar as my childhood bedroom, their smells nearly as intimate.


Sometimes you cut off your hands because you need new ones for new tasks. Sometimes old hands just fall off over time, so slowly you barely notice new hands have grown. If anyone asked my preference, I'd go with the latter. But when I became a mother my hands were cut off rather quickly and new hands had to sprout. Well, they are still sprouting; I'm not entirely comfortable with them yet. They seem so awkward, scrubbed-red and impatient, these hands.


At the seminary today I remembered my old hands. I missed them. They had such a quiet, bookish life. Lots of time to think, those hands--and those eyes. The places those eyes had the leisure to linger! Too often I mistook that leisure for boredom. I remember this: I would be at Starbucks in Tuckahoe by myself, lonely, taking photos of whatever caught my fancy, and Jenny would call. She: "You're at Starbucks! By yourself! You're so lucky!" And I would smile.


I also think of this: whenever a new set of hands grew to feel entirely comfortable on me, they began to change. The confidence of being an old hand inevitably bringing about its own demise. A crude example of this is high school and college--by year four you've got your game going on just when it is all about to end. 

Another baby is on his or her way, and I fear I need not new hands but a second set. But these are my only hands. And they may need another three years before they look as though they are at home on me. Let them remember other more bookish, carefree tasks; someday I will remember what they rocked today and smile.


{ p o e t r y  w e d n e s d a y }

splinters of fire

Having a child has done a lot to muddy the steel trap of my mind--if I ever had such a thing to begin with. My mental edge has long gone soft. Last week, running up the street to get our car out of the garage, I heard the subway train pull out of station on the track below the street, and I thought, "oh no! my car is leaving without me!" It took a moment to remind myself that unlike the subway, privately owned cars do not actually take off without their passengers. I remembered then the time when I was in high school, when my mother was telling us about something that had happened in an elevator, when she corrected herself and said, "whoops, not alligator, I meant to say elevator" and I replied, "But, Mom, you did say elevator!"

Perhaps motherhood, or merely being somewhat muddled, could be viewed as an asset. That is, reason--at least the steel trap version--can be, as Levertov says, "toxic in large quantities." These days I sometimes wish I had a bit more of this toxicity, but I am ever appreciative of the ways muddledom brings God closer. Splinters of fire, indeed.


C O N T R A B A N D

by Denise Levertov

The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That's why the taste of it
drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
God had probably planned to tell us later
about this new pleasure.

We stuffed our mouths full of it

gorged on but and if and how and again

but, knowing no better.

It's toxic in large quantities; fumes

swirled in our heads and around us

to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel,

a wall between us and God, Who was Paradise,

Not that God is unreasonable—but reason

in such excess was tyranny

and locked us into its own limits, a polished cell

reflecting our own faces. God lives

on the other side of the mirror,

but through the slit where the barrier doesn't

quite touch the ground, manages still

to squeeze in—as filtered light,

splinters of fire, a strain of music heard

then lost, than heard again.

{ Poetry Wednesday }

the edginess of the moment and the witnessing presence

It has been miserable for two days, this weather: the kind that makes you want to hunker down and hope the refrigerator is stocked, make soup of whatever the bottom drawers hold. I love rain, I do. But not when it lashes at you, stingy, soaking all of you except maybe your head if it stays tucked closely under the umbrella. And that if the wind doesn't have its way with your umbrella.

And then it is Holy Week. But this week does not feel so holy to me. By some odd twist of fate three doctor appointments converged upon this week, a friend visiting from out of town, a playdate that can't be missed because I want to make friends with this particular hard-to-pin-down mom, and the usual homework assignment for my class. But I can't let my mind wander over to the list of things to do, I'll get up from my computer to add stamps to overdue bills, further packing my grocery list with lines scribbled in along the edges: "get egg dye!" and, "check for Rebecca." It's Holy Week, but it's miserable outside and I'm overbooked. Pascha is coming and I'm fretting.

Out on my errands today, crossing the street in the rain, I thought of something so obvious and simple that you'd think it'd already have etched itself on the inside walls of my consciousness: people are happy because they make the very best of what they already have. Not just in striving to have something better--a job more suited to them, an wider network of friends, a better relationship with their family--but in what they already (yes, oh joy, already) have. It's not that I didn't know this, it's more that it hadn't presented itself as a practice. Something to do, not just to believe.

I waste a lot of brain energy on striving, or anti-striving (which includes private mockery of the New Yorkers I think are striving too ostentatiously). I may get what I want, I may not; but Lord knows I don't need to think about it so much. I read these lines by Pema Chödrön in The Sun's Dog-Eared Page this morning:

"We become less and less able to reside with the even the most fleeting uneasiness or discomfort. We become habituated in reaching for something to ease the edginess of the moment... This is our way to make life predictable. Because we mistake what always results in suffering for what will bring us happiness."

Walking down the street, wind slashing rain across my glasses, I thought about the things I most want to change in my life, and I saw how so often I blame these things directly for my unhappiness, and then I thought about just accepting those things as they are. Not just in word, but in practice. To not ease the "edginess of the moment" by trying to fix them, or assigning blame, but instead to just to let them be. And, correspondingly, to be content--happy even--alongside these things, in spite of them, because of them, regardless of them.

And here, in observance of Poetry Wednesday, and in honor of Holy Week, in honor of the rain that is supposed to end tomorrow, in honor of my mini-epiphany in the middle of a wet city street in Harlem is my poem:

W I T N E S S

Denise Levertov

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

plucking the fruit

O   T A S T E   A N D   S E E

Denise Levertov

The world is

not with us enough.

O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,

meaning The Lord, meaning

if anything all that lives

to the imagination's tongue,

grief, mercy, language,

tangerine, weather, to

breathe them, bite,

savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our

deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,

living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking

the fruit.

* * *

The first stanza of Levertov's poem has been coming to mind often lately, perhaps because I've been riding the subway more often, or--more likely--because Lent is coming.

I hum the hymn from Presanctified liturgy, and remember the packed line for communion at the service I used to attend at the seminary. I was hungry and cranky at those liturgies, and only left my work toward the end of the service; I was better able to manage hunger if I was working than praying. When I arrived, the chapel narthex would be packed with other stragglers. We would be down on our knees, and then up again, then down. All the students seemed to smell of garlic. I dreaded the awkwardness of kneeling down on the ground with so many cassocked men, pressed together, someone always getting a shoe in the face. My mind, as usual, unable to shut off its constant thinking. But then it was time to take presanctified communion, and those of us packed together in the back would slowly move into the heat and light of the sanctuary, and to the commotion of the children. And the choir would be singing "O taste and see, O taste and see that the Lord is good!"

But I no longer work next to a chapel with daily services. I may not make it to Presanctified at all this Lent, as the service lasts past Isaiah's bedtime. But I savor the thought of it, and the memory of those mostly unappreciated liturgies at the seminary: that small, sincere world, surrounded by friends. Crossing the street, plum, quince / living in the orchard and being / hungry, and plucking / the fruit.