Turning

Did I tell you that I tried to stop the world with my shoulder?

It's been aching for a year or so, inflamed to crisis point twice. How did that happen? Hard to say.

This is what I know: people have been dying left and right in my world for the past year, all of them mothers or children. I am not opposed to death, not opposed to the sun setting. I am not against that which is most predictable, lightness and dark, and how could I be? I am sitting inside it.

All the same, I think that I wanted it to slow down a trifle, give me time to say goodbye in my own human way, uncatch my breath. I think with that in my sub-mind, I set my shoulder against it.

The physical therapist, Erik Verdouw, master of the art, smiled knowingly when I told him this. Think of the speed with which this planet revolves, he told me. Think of how everything that appears to be still is yet in constant motion. If you lay on your back in a rainforest when there is not a breath of wind, the trees will creak and lean gently at all times, repositioning themselves with the turn and tilt of our planet. You cannot stop it, he said.

In fact, I do not even think I slowed it down, me with my shoulder. But maybe that's not so. Maybe the pain of withholding scraped into my art so that all that lay before me for a year was blank canvas. There have been precious few blog posts. So much has felt private, guarded. I did not wish to harm anyone in my attempt to capture moments with words.

Our bees have died, too. I am embarrassed to say it, shocked, and sad. I know things die. It is in my picture of the world. Every rotation is complete; we greet the dawn and the dusk each day the same, and still the sadness turns me in my tracks across the yard. I lean against the rabbit pen and cry with a dull moan like tall trees moving without knowing why.

I understand nothing. One hive has honey, more than twenty-five pounds left, I think, and the other needed feeding. But now, it's hard to say whether even the light hive starved; the marauding bees are filling the air around it, and they have been swarming it for a time, I suspect, looking back.

Between the frames, the bodies of my bees are piled light and paper thin, softly coated in mildew. They have been dead awhile, and it has not been wet.

All of this stopping things with my shoulder hard against the turn of the world, this effort to pause, take things in, has rendered me blind, I see. How did I not notice that the bees were not my own?

I am a stillpoint in a sea of color, some cosmic kaleidoscope spilling perfect prisms into one another at every rotation. Something always sticks and holds within the glass, but still the colors change, falling all around as if the stillness itself demanded motion at its edges.

I am breathing again, and that is something toward letting go, moving along. At dusk, I will check the hives in my full bee suit to be sure my colonies have indeed collapsed. Then, I will bring the boxes in so that the spring swarms I plan to catch will have a meal waiting.

What else is there to do?