The Keepers of the Bees

Cities, Like Dreams, Are Made of Desires and Fears—Italo Calvino

Sometimes

drifting down third avenue on a summer Saturday evening, I grow dizzy
with the press of bodies. Their proximity, that skunky lemon sweat 
of weed. Everywhere the sound of footsteps arriving and retreating, 
or massed outside of bars and restaurants, And just beneath,
a tymbal buzz and hum as thick as cicadas rising from the ground

after ten years of sleep. I understand the man I drove past on 60, 
waving his hands around his head, warding off an imaginary swarm 
of bees—a flailing that would have seemed comical if he hadn’t kept 
leaning into traffic as if it were stream he could dive into: an urge 
that makes sense to me and why I won’t stand on the edges

of rooftops or cliffs and dislike stairs. Don’t seat me in an exit row. 
I can’t trust myself. Who can? We are so bent on self-annihilation. 
Now every month is wildfire season and even here in West Virginia 
the skies are gray and taste of shell casings. Maybe all those whispers 
calling us into woods were something

from inside, pushing at the ribs. That need to
unhinge from the hive, erase oneself and disappear. Some days 
I hear the many footsteps in the hallways and all I want to do
is lock the door and crawl beneath my desk. Each life is more
than the noise it makes, the space it takes. That’s the problem.

There is a story there and another and another, each on the verge 
of telling or silence. It can be so hard to listen. My problem 
isn’t with my hearing. Once, at a bus stop in Memphis a man, 
waiting on the 1:15 to Michigan told me he was on his way
to see his son, it had been years since he’d seen him, and he
 
gripped a stuffed Chiwawa in his fist. I remember him–buzzy, 
jittery, one knee bouncing. Maybe he was on something? Or crazy?
He said other things, but I was on my way home too 
and it had been a long day, and I was going through
my own shit and needed a shower. I thought he said we were going

at same time to the same place, but I never saw him climb
the steps and take a seat. Though it’s possible that I’d misheard 
what he was saying or didn’t get a good look at his face.
When people talk to me, I often look away. I remember 
that stuffed dog in his fist and how it made me think

of my own dad and how I needed to call him.
Calvino said the inferno is not a place, but people. And how 
can a flame do anything but feed, intent on the world’s 
unmaking. The trick is to find the ones who are not the fire 
and give them space to breathe. As for me, I’m prone to panic.

And some days everything and everyone looks like kindling 
which is why a friend of mine keeps suggesting I take a Klonopin. 
My problem isn’t breathing. Yesterday a neighbor who keeps bees 
showed me how she uses smoke to calm a colony. If that worked 
on people, long ago, we would have put ourselves to sleep.