then the rest follows: poems about the last summer afternoons

To Speak of Many Things

Some of those who “spoke” to it left the village forever. Others never said a word again.

It was like a hive of bees, only it was not at all like bees.

It was like a hive in that there were many of it, and each of it was like the other.

It arrived in the fall, out of the sky.

Each bit of the hive was divided into four sloping sections. There were thousands and thousands of them, and they moved with the hive, or they moved the hive.

The day it arrived was clear and cold and Aunt Auo said she saw it coming when it was way up in the sky next to the sun.

It made a sound like shivering trees and feet on hollow ground when it moved.

The parts were mostly small, like bees, but not always. They were really not at all like bees, but their sloping sections sometimes moved in the way that a bee’s wings would move. The effect would shimmer out from a point like wind in grass.

Aunt Auo was the first to speak to it. It touched her first, of all things on the earth.

When the hive came out of the sky it was straight and narrow. But it slowly pooled and folded in on itself like honey when it reached the ground, and then sent out tendrils of thousands of bits of itself, that stiffened and knotted so that the general effect was that of a thick-rooted tree stretching to the heavens.

I was fifteen when I spoke to it.

It was Aunt Auo who chose me. She was not really my aunt, nor anyone’s aunt that I knew of. Her eyes fell upon me before she chose and I knew.

In the many years since it touched Aunt Auo, the hive had draped itself for a circular mile around its center, which had been a rocky hill and was now smooth and bulged with protrusions of hive and tall silver elms which had fallen to the slow relentless push and pull of tendrils.

Aunt Auo led me from the school building and a dozen wary eyes followed me. Those had been my eyes in past seasons, when Aunt Auo chose a Speaker. I didn’t know that the careful eyes would not be mine, not until Aunt Auo’s gaze cut into me like sharp glass.

We never knew when the choosing would be, but the speaking always happened immediately after. The eyes knew this, and they followed. Eyes watched from the windows of other buildings, too, and emerged from inside to walk behind.

Aunt Auo’s skin wilted and creased over sharp bones, and her right eye was blank and cloudy, but she walked steadily along the rough dirt path through the elm forest. Those behind us were quiet, save the crunch of their feet against fallen twigs and frost-fixed leaves. Aunt Auo did not look back, and I could not. I looked at my feet as they broke the frozen ground.

I heard the thump and shudder of the hive before I saw it.

Aunt Auo kept her pace as we stepped onto the edge of a tendril and continued along and up it. The sloping wing-like sections were smooth and hard, but their insides shifted at the weight of our feet. It was like treading on a layer of pebbles floating across the surface of a marsh. Our followers fell behind.

The “mouth” of the hive was at the base of its trunk, or that is where it spoke.

I felt the hive quiver as its millions throbbed like heartbeat, trembled and whispered like blood moving under our feet. Closer to the trunk, the sloping sections softened and stuck together more closely. My feet sunk farther in with each step, and pulled away the sticky shells of some of the hive’s pieces.

To “speak” to the hive was not really to speak at all. The speaker and the hive conversed by touch and movement.

I didn’t have time to prepare, or anything to prepare, really. I had seen the speaking before. I stripped and stood in front of the hive’s “mouth,’’ and I felt the gentle give and sticky pull of the hive’s many parts against my naked feet.

The mouth of the hive hummed and flowed; it was more active here, the shimmering movement hypnotizing. I was meant to climb inside. Aunt Auo stood to the side, above me; she bobbed like a river-bound stick to the rhythm of the hive. The rest had caught up and stood at a distance, breathing noisily. I could feel their eyes, although I did not look back.

The slow throb of the the hive comforted me and I was not afraid. I climbed inside its humming hollow. The hive shivered and the swarm whirled faster. The bits bounded across and around one another to pile and bulge against the edges of the mouth until it came together and enclosed me in complete and solid darkness.

I had a fleeting thought that I should be uncomfortable being closed in with such certainty, but absolute darkness and soft stickiness moved around me and eased my mind. The chaotic motion of the parts rocked me back and forth, up and down. My heartbeat slowed down to match the pulsing sound of the hive.

With a distant curiosity I felt pieces of the hive attach themselves to my body, and I let it guide my limbs. I shivered up and down my spine as my head and face were pulled in strange directions.

I felt a strange movement around my head, or inside my head—not a disagreeable movement but unfamiliar. And—I can’t describe what I felt. My body was gone, or extended. I lost all sense, but I felt something. I will try to describe it as sight, but it was more than that. No, not more than sight—completely and utterly separate. Time was gone, had never existed. Every happening was at once around me and inside me and also not there at all. And the hive was part of it all, and I was part of it, and I understood it. I don’t anymore, but I remember that I understood. I was the hive.

The hive and I spoke of many things, although we didn’t speak in any sense of the word. The best way I can say it is that I saw many images at once and at the same time felt my thoughts move across large distances, but that is not how it was. I felt the silence of the space that is not our earth. I felt my consciousness move along the pieces of the hive and saw my home fade into a spinning globe. And I saw darkness all around, and everywhere I intersected the darkness, hardened my outer layers to protect myself from cold and emptiness. I came upon other globes amidst the darkness, illuminated by glowing spheres of gas, and I engulfed them, made them part of me. I was the globes, I was the frozen, dead parts on the edge of the darkness, I was the mouth, I was the body undulating inside, and I was moving the body. I was a heart lying in warm liquid beneath my own bodies, and I was the first body that formed the rest of me. All of this was at once happening and not happening to me, and I was doing it.

And then there was a focusing. It was like I was shrunk into a tiny point, but that tiny point was myself and I remembered again what I was, and I despaired. I remembered that I had eyes, and that I could see light, and the light was at once piercing and dull. I remembered that I could speak, and my voice was both harsh and drab.

Before Aunt Auo died she asked me to carry her to the hive and tried to wrap herself in it, but the hive wouldn’t take her. She stopped eating, and it took her a month to die. I choose the speaker now. I don’t know why I do it, or why Aunt Auo did it. Maybe we don’t want to be alone, though most of the others disappear to somewhere far away and I don’t often speak to the rest. I understand the desire to leave, to move a great distance, but I know that nothing on this earth is truly a great distance, or even a small one. They know this, too, but still they wander.

They also know that this world will become part of the hive, and that it already has become part of it. And they know that all of this will happen and has happened and is happening. So we don’t need to speak. We understand each other, or we understand that we can’t understand. We don’t need to speak, as we have already spoken all that there is.