What Eve Knows

a poem

Mar 10, 2024

Visions of the Garden of Eden, by female Iraqi artist Suad Al-Attar, © 2011

Somewhere out in the spring dark, the moon is gathering darkness, from the last bright sliver to total silence. We are between rains.

I can see my childhood mountain out the window by daylight. Her silhouette looks like a sleeping woman, nose and breast and belly to the sky. Since I was very small, I’ve known her.

My mother and I scrambled up her steep trails the other day toward the east peak through sun-warmed scrub oaks and sages. We thought we saw signs of a black bear’s passage. Hummingbirds kept their spring guard from the tops of little branches, diving at us if we came too near their nests.

Before dawn, Venus as morning star will sit beside the dark moon. This is the release of her seventh vestment; She removes her royal robe; She is absolutely bare.

On the tectonic peninsula that sits so thin, between realms of fog and wind and elk and shore, the purple iris is starting to bloom. There are yellow wild violets under the pines. White milkmaids. Wild strawberry flowers.

Yesterday morning my father and I saw an osprey beginning its nest building, carry stick after stick through the sky to a pine tree top. At dusk, driving around the reservoir, my friend saw the long elegant tail of a mountain lion crossing the road.

I touch each of these things with my words and myself in order to stay sane in an increasingly insane world.

The poem I’m reading for you today, “What Eve Knows,” comes from my Venus Year. I share it in honor of the morning star’s final meetings with the crescent moon over the last few days. I pray that the star’s eye watches over the women giving birth right now in Gaza under constant bombardment, without anesthesia for emergency c-sections, without sufficient sanitary pads, without enough food or clean water. I pray that the star’s eye watches over the Israeli women still held captive, and all mothers in this horrific genocide.

This poem comes from the first season I ever kept bees on my own. The year prior to its writing, I had been living in Crete, and my Cretan boyfriend at the time was the first to bring me to a beehive and have me help him check on his colonies. I stood, absolutely still, and held frame after frame of velvet-dark, resonating honeybees, wafted with their sweet mana scent, as he examined the comb to see how the queen’s laying and the honey and pollen stores were progressing. In one humming moment, it was like I had fallen right into the hive, right into a presence, a mystery, a love, I am still only at the beginning of my devotion to.

The next spring, home in California, heartbroken not just about the Cretan man but far more deeply about the divorce that had come right before, I bought my own hive, and housed a swam caught by a dear friend in it. This was at the beginning of the pandemic. I was sick on and off for the first nine months of 2020. The bees were my lifeline right to the heart of God, and to my own heart. The scent of their propolis at dusk, emanating in warm wafts from the hive mouth, helped me heal the last lingering covid symptoms.

I wrote this poem— I remember vividly the writing of it — while watching the bees from my chair in the meadow near them as spring winds blew and pine pollen from the pines coated everything.

Here it is —