'May His Books Swarm Again When Selected'

A reader has passed along a poem she says reminds her of me. I haven’t read David Livewell’s work before. Based on “Telling the Books” he seems like a thoughtful writer, not one to shriek or preach. His poem is preceded by an epigraph from William Longgood’s The Queen Must Die and Other Affairs of Bees and Men (1985): 

“Bees were considered members of the family; if a beekeeper died, a black ribbon was attached to his hives, an ancient custom known as ‘telling the bees.’” The poem was first published in the Autumn 2021 issue of The Hudson Review:

 

“Mourners would ‘tell the bees’ and drape the hive

When a beekeeper died.

The news ensured the insects stayed alive

And honey flowed inside.

 

“Who told his books? In sly self-portraiture,

The colored spines in crates

Depict his buzzing mind and eye the door,

His name on their bookplates.

 

“He’d read for hours and let the lamplight rouse

Each poet’s lyric throat.

No loneliness when, night by night, he’d browse

The lasting lines they wrote.

 

“May his books swarm again when selected

To join another’s tomes,

And his own sweet lines be resurrected

From hidden honeycombs.”

 

The poem speaks to a faintly nagging anxiety: What will happen to all these books after my death? Talk about self-centered. The problem is that I tend to mythologize this long-collected library (earliest volume, a Bible, acquired in 1961) as a single organism rather than a hive of individuals. To break it up, to have books claimed by family and friends, some sold to a book dealer and others trucked to the library for donation, feels like a violation – not of me but of the books. Of course, I’ll be past caring but in my sentimental imagination, my books are my autobiography. So, what’s the ideal outcome? That one of my sons claims the collection, keeps it intact, and reads it as I have read it. “May his books swarm again when selected / To join another’s tomes . . .” Fat chance. Even I recognize myself as a peculiar sort of reader, whose bibliophilic trait is probably recessive. Walter de la Mare closes his poem “Books” with these lines:

 

“Abiding joy is theirs; rich solitude,

Where mortal cares a while no more intrude

[. . .]

Yet every word is void of life and light

Until the soul within transfigures it—

Then sighs, for rapture, wildly pines to see

Who wakes this music, under what strange tree—

And pines in vain; for it is Poetry.”