Larissa Andrusyshyn reads “Telling the Bees”
Telling the Bees
The Royal Beekeeper whispers your mistress is dead, but don't you go, taps the hive and drapes it with a black ribbon. The bees are in mourning. Old traditions keep us busy with something other than grief, so we’re told the bees are messengers between worlds. They’ll put a good word in for you. If the Fentanyl should be your last catastrophe, the bees will come and wake you in the wreck. Our parents teach us to tuck and roll, run, call fire and fire and fire. That’s what I want to do, And scream a cluster of exploding stars into your brain, plot the galaxies that spiral beyond ours where we could swim beneath the surface of the ice like pickerel. Maybe we are the hooks that float above them. Brother, maybe I am the ice and you are the gorge that guides the water. We should have been born on Lake Winnipeg. We should have been fish. You fell off the wagon. I peeled back my life and found us back in Reno, in some dusty casino where I was staring at a taxidermied bear in the lobby while you all ate dinner. Memory is a toboggan you drag behind you. I want to tell the bees that before there was no going back, your cracked teeth, criminal records, conspiracy videos, the scissor of anger twisting your face— before that, you were the strong one, blond and blue-eyed. A good Ukrainian son with his tomboy sister. I was the one sinking while you stayed afloat. Until the poles flipped and I found myself wanting the bees to carry that version of you back to us. When it comes to disaster there’s always the question of what survived, weave of mornings where I worry for the phone to ring. I can’t plan a funeral; I can’t play the grieving sister when I’ve lived up here so long with you underwater. This week everything is disaster; Notre Dame is burning. I read about the beekeeper who keeps the hives on the roof, how he sees the funnel rising over the city and he asks after his apiaries. In the wide angle of the news I’m thinking of close ups— the velour bodies nudging through smoke, finding a way in the silt and wet stone. Of the many photographs shared: the serpentine spire falling, a Paris skyline on fire and below the crowds signing arias, satellite images showed the bees coming and going in the hives. With everything looking so irreversible, the bees went to touch the impossible world, to deliver the messages, and every one of them returned.
Kevin Matthews on “Telling the Bees”
This poem treats loss not from the point of view of the condolence-offerer, but the passenger in grief, longing for co-witnesses and just not knowing where this thing will take us. While we read, as it also happens in grieving, the focus pulls down to the speaker’s intimate knowledge of one particular hidden feature of Notre Dame, amid all the carnage, as if it could provide a synecdoche for disaster too great in scope to be verbalized. It’s not easy writing grief not bogged down in cliché, but “Telling the Bees” avoids the negative rendition of loss in favour of the experience, the grind of it.
Bios
Larissa Andrusyshyn
Larissa Andrusyshyn has published two poetry collections: Proof and Mammoth. She works for non-profits facilitating creative writing workshops for at-risk youth and is busy finishing up her latest manuscript. She lives in Montreal with her adoring cat Lulu. [updated in 2023]