June 7, 2012

They have promised rain all week; it's Thursday, and while there is a breeze this morning, there are also white clouds and the pale blue, humidity-hazed sky.  I see little prospect of rain, but perhaps later.  The cicadas have been singing since first light, and last night there was one lone frog in the dark croaking repeatedly, rather dementedly, over and over the same bullish thick-bodied sound.  It never moved but came from the same spot in the night until I finally fell asleep.  This morning more insect sound than bird song.  Perhaps the cat roaming the yard has kept the birds at bay.  Everything looks rather limp and dusty, the long leaves of cane droop, and the maple branches turn down, softer and the leaves looking pale and thin.  We could use the rain, I worry about us falling back into the drought pattern and losing more trees that were damaged by it last year.

I'm still thinking about Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451, and what book I would be.  For months now, on my desk has been Nancy Willard's Swimming Lessons.  I think some days I might be that book.  I'm older now and actually think I could memorize a book of poetry.  I like her poems because they are so human, and they deal with a lot of ordinary things, but in ways that make you look at them differently.   There is a section in Swimming Lessons from one of her earlier books, 19 Masks for the Naked Poet, and the poems touch on many ordinary things, things poets wonder about, dragons, the moon, weather, the future, love . . . and yet, turning over her words, something new steps from the shadows of these things and walks into your heart and your head and small wonders take up residence there.  For the bees at my window this morning, for the sound of them in the world, for what they make possible . . .

The Poet Enters the Sleep of the Bees

Turning to honey one morning, I passed
through their glass cells and entered
the sleep of the bees.
The bees were making a lexicon
of the six-sided names of God,

clover's breath, dewflesh,
ritual of thorn, a definitive work
to graft their names to their roots.
For days I hiked over their slipshod sounds.
At last I saw a green lion
eating a hole in the sun,

and a red dragon burning itself alive
to melt the snow that lay like a cap
on the sleep of the bees.
Their sleep was a factory
of sweetness with no author.

Every syllable was swept clean,
every act was without motive.
Please forgive me this poor translation.
How could I hold
my past to my present when I heard
ten thousand tongues flowing along like gold?

Nancy Willard

In Buddhism, I believe, ten thousand things means all of physical reality, the things of this world, of the universe of the senses.  When I see it in a poem or some other writing, I'm never sure whether the ten thousand things are a distraction from the spiritual or the only way to reach it.  I still don't know.  But here in this poem, I get the feeling that entering into . . . the sleep of the bees, somehow brings us into the moment, that ever-lasting moment that is all there is.  The past you cannot hold on to, any more than you can live in the future moment.  You only live right here in this now, and for this moment I might not enter the sleep of the bees but enter into the sound of the cicadas clinging to twigs and trunks.  Here they emerge every year, unlike the ones farther north that have 13 and 17 year cycles.  Here from early spring, as soon as the ground is warm to late summer you hear cicadas, in the day time, the sound of summer, the sound of looking for love, the sound of continuing.  Sound of a southern summer, like the smell of magnolia in the heat of the day, or the licorice smell of oleander, like keeping an eye on the Gulf for storms, the cry of gulls before rain, and the weight of humidity and heat pressing against your skin, all the daily things of our summer.  I like to think the bees flying past my window are making a lexicon of the six-sided names of God, and that their work is never finished, but continues to make that sweetness every day.