DISTANCE
1.31
Tongue and lip gave birth to a root: bj-t
a combination of ‘bee’ and feminine gender spilling out from
an Egyptian song.
With lively velar breath, the word becomes ‘that which
is forbidden’.
Further east, its close cousin means ‘to speak’.
Released from higher to lower pressure, sound travels as
wind.
To the north, in mountainous regions dampened by cold of
snow, the word for bee has a different sound, apis, and a
second meaning: ‘prison’
or barred from what is not essential.
Formed in tight crypt of darkness, what might the expanse of
quivering sky do to the bee, a creature made like glass?
wavering-light-bee
Fractured by human mind, things act upon each other:
subject enlivened by predicate.
1.32
But I do not want to tell the honeybee who she is. Can I
separate her from myself? How can she be more than Apis
millifera, a description that is not even true?
She crawls from out of tight skins–a geometrically ordered
wax home, departs from the hive in warmest mid-afternoon,
and launches into crude brilliance suspended by nothing:
le soleil d’artifice– the feeling of a ‘disquieted sun’, immensity
she must come to master.
Body transparent, she swells with the sharpness of light.
The sky so large, she could dissolve…
and yet, she chooses earth and circles home, carving her coil
of familiarity.
1.33
Summoned, she tastes the flowers, low landscape:
a script to read and path to follow.
In her movement, a trajectory back and forth between hive
and spray, a moderate sway with sun, repetition leads the
way.
Oh, must we rely on laboratory experiment to tell us?
Bees have an inward feeling for the sun arching through sky–
the fall and the rise: levity tossed with gravity.
Codes pass between them–too intricate for mere mind here,
so we say bees ‘dance’. Better yet, say ‘quiver’ or ‘leap’ in
curves and lines.
To understand would be like mapping what is not heard
nor seen. But even a map – just like a word – is not a correct,
nor absolute thing.
Mots, morts (words, death), the first born from the second,
salvaged moments from dim, spent light.
1.34
The bee has her own state of affairs: a visual existence
edges of light against darkness, objects as movement in
perpetually shifting shape, the hint of an alphabet as
spectrum of intensity in script of patterns.
To find the field:
density of light’s edge, then higher, emptiness,
scattered low, still
To return home:
still, scattered low, emptiness, then higher,
density’s edge
Her external world, a self-created stage of ultra-violet
radiance reaches back to the sun. But only so far can radiance
go, for script is but a glowing memory shining into the bee.
With age, the bee forgets the sequence and loses her way.
If picture does precede thought, what is the difference
between arrangement and idea? If the bee had thoughts they
might be like ears, swooned by textures from the chorus
field.
1.35
In peak of summer sun on flux of screaming light pushing in
and drawing out across the sky, within four weeks the bee
works herself to death visiting flowers, carrying the elixir of
nature back to the hive.
There will be no stopping, for inscribed in the bee is also a
sense of winter.
Not like birds that flock, or other migratory things, the bee
remains tied to her own ground.
Her end with wings so frayed, the colony rejects her. Does
she suffer, beat up and shorn from small life laden with the
future of earth? Or are we her suffering, and she biological
dust as gestation of a full world…
1.36
Must we become lost in the idea of death? The shadow–
always bound to its subject by the root, the still, dark garden
could be an underground map of radicals. More than circles
and lines, they recover possibilities.
But even a diagram is meaningless, at this point far too
personal, for death is everything that cannot be shared.
Limitation:
(Is. Is not.)
the perfective point in spirit of contradiction,
my bodily against your bodily…
the mind, how it must always picture the way things differ
so that a predicate could be useful to a subject.
Flower and root, bee and light–
we make them act upon each other.
And the pure life between?
–when tongue and lip become the central axis of the unseen.
Sabrina Dalla Valle, MFA, is the author of 7 Days and Night in the Desert (Tracing the Origin) (2013, Kelsey Street Press, winner of best first book); 7 Days and Night in the Desert, chapbook (2012, Mindmade Books); “Resignify” in Best Poems of 2012 (2013, Kore Press); and “Alchemical Khiasmos” co-authored with Aaron Cheak in Alchemical Traditions (2013, Numen Books). Her poetry and essays have been published and archived in numerous journals and venues– notably UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (forthcoming); University of Pennsylvania’s The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (PennSound); San Francisco State University’s The Poetry Center; New York Quarterly; and many other small presses.
Sabrina lives in St Petersburg, Florida and teaches writing and consciousness studies on-line as an adjunct professor for the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles, CA.