Mona Van Duyn

Love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it. CAMUS All day my husband pounds on the upstairs porch. Screeches and grunts of wood as the wall is opened keep the whole house tormented. He is trying to reach the bees, he is after bees. This is the climax, an end to two summers of small operations with sprays and ladders. Last June on the porch floor I found them dead, a sprinkle of dusty bugs, and next day a still worse death, until, like falling in love, bee-haunted, I swept up bigger and bigger loads of some hatch, I thought, sickened, and sickening me, from what origin? My life centered on bees, all floors were suspect. The search was hopeless. Windows were shut. I never find where anything comes from. But in June my husband’s fierce sallies began, inspections, cracks located and sealed, insecticides shot; outside, the bees’ course watched, charted; books on bees read. I tell you I swept up bodies every day on the porch. Then they’d stop, the problem was solved; then they were there again, as the feelings make themselves known again, as they beseech sleepers who live innocently in will and mind. It is no surprise to those who walk with their tigers that the bees were back, no surprise to me. But they had left themselves so lack-luster, their black and gold furs so deathly faded. Gray bugs that the broom hunted were like a thousand little stops when some great lurch of heart takes place, or a great shift of season. November it came to an end. No bees. And I could watch the floor, clean and cool, and, from windows, the cold land. But this spring the thing began again, and his curse went upstairs again, and his tinkering and reasoning and pride. It is the man who takes hold. I lived from bees, but his force went out after bees and found them in the wall where they hid. And now in July he is tearing out the wall, and each board ripped brings them closer to his hunting hand. It is quiet, has been quiet for a while. He calls me, and I march from a dream of bees to see them, winged and unwinged, such a mess of interrupted life dumped on newspapers— dirty clots of grubs, sawdust, stuck fliers, all smeared together with old honey, they writhe, some of them, but who cares? They go to the garbage, it is over, everything has been said. But there is more. Wouldn’t you think the bees had suffered enough? This evening we go to a party, the breeze dies, late, we are sticky in our old friendships and light-headed. We tell our funny story about the bees. At two in the morning we come home, and a friend, a scientist, comes with us, in his car. We’re going to save the idea of the thing, a hundred bees, if we can find so many unrotted, still warm but harmless, and leave the rest. We hope that the neighbors are safe in bed, taking no note of these private catastrophes. He wants an enzyme in the flight-wing muscle. Not a bad thing to look into. In the night we rattle and raise the lid of the garbage can. Flashlights in hand, we open newspapers, and the men reach in a salve of happenings. I can’t touch it. I hate the self-examined who’ve killed the self. The dead are darker, but the others have moved in the ooze toward the next moment. My God one half-worm gets its wings right before our eyes. Searching fingers sort and lay bare, they need the idea of bees—and yet, under their touch, the craze for life gets stronger in the squirming, whitish kind. The men do it. Making a claim on the future, as love makes a claim on the future, grasping. And I, underhand, I feel it start, a terrible, lifelong heave taking direction. Unpleading, the men prod till all that grubby softness wants to give,to give.

I was out last night, the very picture of a sneak, dark and hunched-over, breaking and entering again. Why do I do it? And why, when I can afford serious residences, do I keep to this one room? Perhaps if I had not lost track of the difference between the real and the ideal it would never have happened. I hide here almost entirely now. When I go out, when I creep into those silent houses, I steal newspapers. An armload, no more than I can carry comfortably. Sometimes they are already tied up on the side porch or by the kitchen stove. Nobody misses them. They think each other or the maid has carried them out to the street. They say there is something intractable out there, the Law, the Right to Privacy, the World. In the days when my obsession was only a wound-up toy, squeaking and jabbering in my chest, I could have believed them. I sit by the window today (There is very little space left now, thought I have left corridors wide enough to walk through so I won't lose touch) holding my latest on my lap, handling them, fondling them, taking in every column. They are becoming more and more precious. My delusion grows and spreads. Lately it seems to me as I read of murders, wars, bankruptcies, jackpot winnings, the news if written in that perfect style of someone speaking to the one who knows and loves him. Long before they miss me, I think, the room will be perfectly solid. When they break in the door and, unsurprised, hardened to the most bizarre vagaries, begin to carry out my treasure, death's what they'll look for underneath it all, those fluent, muscled, imaginative men, sweating in their innocent coveralls. But I will be out in broad daylight by then, answering, having accepted utterly the heart's conditions. Tell them I wish them well, always, that I've been happy.

"The younger brother roasted a breast of Pishiboro's elephant wife and handed Pishiboro some, which he presently ate. Then the younger brother said in a voice full of scorn. 'Oh you fool. You lazy man. You were married to meat and you thought it was a wife.'" FROM A MYTH OF THE BUSHMEN Poised upside down on its duncecap, a shrunken purple head, True Blueberry, enters its tightening frame of orange lip, and the cream of a child’s cheek is daubed with Zanzibar Cocoa, while Here at the Martha Washington Ice Cream Store we outdo the Symbolistes. a fine green trickle— Pistachio? Mint Julep? Words have colors, and colors are tasty. sweetens his chin. In front of me Licorice teeters like a lump of coal on its pinkish base of Pumpkin. A Rauschenberg tongue fondles this rich donnée , then begins to erase it. Turning from all that is present in the flesh, so to speak, let the eye wander off to a menu, where it can start to ingest “Quite Sour Lemon sherbet topped with a stem cherry and chocolate sprinkles Swilling in language, all floating in bubbly cherry phosphate the bloated imagination is urged to open still wider and shovel it in, and served with a twist of pretzel.” In this world “Creamy Vanilla and Smooth Swiss Chocolate ice creams” can be “blended with chopped pineapple, dark fudge sauce, ripe bananas, whipped topping, cookies, roasted nutmeats and nippy chopped cherries.” the Unconscious, that old hog, being in charge here of the creative act. At about the moment my tastebuds receive a last tickle of Gingersnap and begin to respond to Orange Fudge, I look at you who have bought my ice cream cones for twenty years, Moving another new ice to the mouth we needn’t remember and look away it is always the same mouth that melts it. My mind assembles a ribald tower of sherbet dips, all on one cone, Apricot, Apple, Tangerine, Peach, Prune, Lime, and then it topples. You are steadier than I. You order one dip always, or, in a dish, two dips of the same flavor. In this hysterical brilliance of neon Come on, consumers, we’ve got to keep scooping it is twelve or fifteen of us to thirty ice creams. so that the creams shall not rise like cold lava out of their bins, numbing our feet, our knees, freezing our chests, our chins, our eyes, Open the door, quick, and let in two handholding adolescents. Coping with all those glands makes them good and hungry. so that, flying out of their cannisters, the chopped nuts shall not top off our Technicolor grave with their oily ashes. Listen! All around us toothsome cones are suffering demolition down to the last, nipple-like tip. How do we know where to stop? Perhaps the glasses and dishes are moulded of candy, and the counters and windows… Over your half-eaten serving of Italian Delight, why are you looking at me the way you are looking at me?