"The Hive" is taken from The White Bridge. See our feature in this issue. ______ "The Hive" was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod. Sections 6 & 7 of “The Hive” were originally published in Nimrod, Awards 21: Bol. 42, No. 2, Spring/Summer, 1999.

Francine Sterle The Hive 1. In winter, I tunnel through snow. In spring, it’s the plow. A thousand cuts in the field. In summer, a thorn scrapes a bloody furrow in my skin. Ditches fill with color. Trees, once green, go bare to the top. My feet make a trench in the leaves as an insistent bee rises from the underbrush. Does it expect to soothe me when it kisses my hand? 2. I wanted you as no one has ever wanted me, but I waited while the first gray hairs appeared on my head, waited for the stars’ glacial drift around a snowy comet that comes once a century, its fading tail luminous as fishline, waited for the other woman to die or divorce, waited long after I refused. I was left waiting while bees hummed in their hives and winter choked the river’s throat with ice. 3. Amid green thumbs of weeds, a most common flower sends up from masses of dark, deeply-cut leaves, tall blue blossoms. Just opened, it lures a visiting bee that zigzags flower to flower, disappears inside a petal’s puckered skirt. Eurydice, I think. When I turn, a head powdered with white pollen emerges, and the shadow mine makes moves plant by plant around the garden. 4. The day I found the plump corpse of a bee lying motionless on the window sill, I held it in my hand. Cradling its velvet-coated body, I noticed my own lifeline like an arrow underneath it, while outside, toiling bees crisscrossed in the sun. Consider the bee and see how she labours. 5. Everywhere in the exotic flowering of that garden, bees soared and hovered, wings beating the air, heart-shaped heads visible on honeysuckle and catkins collecting acres of pollen, the world astir around me. It was there, between the dense notes of your pulse, you kissed me, bewildered about where to place this moment given our complicated lives. Days later the tremor you sent through me returned: the aftershock of bees drawing nectar to make a single drop of honey. 6. Look at the beehive you’ve made of my heart Look at the swarm clustering around me 55555 and the wax I use 55555 trying to seal myself off Look at what you’ve become 55555 a bear 55555 clumsy and mulish Look at yourself 55555 nosing the feathery ferns 55555 the milky-colored mushrooms 55555 ignoring the dizzy funnel of bees at your back Look at the muscles bunch in your legs 55555 then stretch the long length of a tree Look at your claws thrusting toward me 55555 your muzzle smeared 55555 by the dripping honey Look at me tremble Look at the paper-thin comb 55555 wedged between my ribs Look at it 55555 then tell me again how the wind you miss 55555 sleeps in my hair 55555 again 55555 about the tangled hues in my eyes. 7. Inhabited by bees. Spring still burning in my eyes. The intricate dance home from the flower. In my deepest thoughts, the smell of the hive. I surrender to it all. My heart is thick with pleasure, but I’ll tell you about the holes inside, the honeycomb I’ve worked for years to fill. 8. A secluded nest and bees breathing beneath my ribs. A scent of clover in the air. Certain summer nights love comes to me frantic for meaning. I haven’t got the answer, but I know how honey sweetens the tongue, how my own blood hums from the bee’s nimble bite. 9. First the swarm tone, then a dense cloud forming, the impetuous flight to limb or random stump, fence or ladder where bees alight. Are these the ones Aristaeus saw sicken and die, that touched the lips of Pindar and Plato lying helplessly in their cradles, that crossed the lips of St. Ambrose before entering his mouth? 10. The greedy bee returns to its hive with sticky feet, a packed pollen basket. Half-drunk from venturing beyond the petal’s crease and into the trumpet-throated lily drooping on the garden wall, it drones, the same sound that flows through my veins as we sleep, side by side across a continent, our words holding us together like the thin cells of a hive. Is this the unhesitating life I was meant to lead? Many chambers? Much noise? 11. From my pursed mouth, a single word works its way out like a pillow feather then floats to the floor, but I’m not ready for the truth, cannot ask who or when or why. Why bother with explanations when my tongue is dead in my mouth, and thoughts half-crazed in my head. I stare out at a frozen landscape, at moonlit gardens of ice spreading over the fields, at a fraction of light, so far off, shining at me from the other side. 12. A hum of bees from dry lips all night in my ear: a swarm of words inside a crimson flower. It clings to me––the sugary smear of honey on my hands, pollen dusting my breast. What frightens me awake, lighting a flame deep in my cheek? I fly out of myself, all that we love between us. 13. From an open window, a breeze blows in thin bandages of fog. The black night softens. On the fringe of audibility, the truth draws near. 14. The moment they’d sensed thick puffs of smoke filling the hive the feral bees forgot their tending and readied themselves to abandon it. Gorged on honey, too full to bend into stinging position for defense, the docile workers forgot how singlemindedly they’d returned from those snow asters spreading through the meadow. Spooked by fire from a smoldering bee smoker that smelled of pine needles and sumac bobs, they ate their way into a stupor while the beekeeper cut that dead limb and carried it away. 15. When your letter appeared, I held it for an hour, remembering the way our bodies joined one last time to say good-bye. I barely spoke for a month, my words falling away as I stared at snow swirling a thousand miles between us. Not even a warm day could woo me into the world to watch the bees’ brief thistledown flight. You never wrote again, but I will tell you about memory, the crust it formed so I could heal, the scab I picked until it bled. 16. For months winter disguised the hidden hive body nobody touched, but after spring melted the last snow from my hand and all that was unsaid vanished in a river of water, the slow-headed bees dropped from the comb one by one, half-starved, the colony so strong they’d run out of food weeks before any flowers would bloom. I put out pots of sugared syrup to save them. It was only a matter of time. How could I stop those clumsy, richly-veined wings from stirring inside? 17. How sharply the thorn stuck in my finger, how reliable my blood making its own rose in my hand, and this memory of you: a petal the flower didn’t feel when it fell . . .