The Honey-eating Man

Evalina Palmer was an American heiress obsessed with the ancient Greeks. A poem, a vase, a song—if it was busted or missing parts it inspired her. Angelos Sikelianos was a Greek poet obsessed with Ancient Greece as well as the Greeks of his time. He was sure he could hear the thrum of his own blood in the cicadas screaming in the trees, and the sound revealed marriages between past and future, between Muses and humans. Together, the two implemented a vision of reviving the ancient festivals and plays at Delphi with the goal of bringing about conversation, maybe even world peace.

They begat Glaukos, who moved to the U.S. and begat my father. By the time I was born, seemingly vast fortunes had been spent on this project, all ancestral belongings lost.

They slept in blankets on the slopes of Hymettos outside Athens, in the stone house Raymond and Isadora had begun constructing, with a circular view over the mountains, the sea, and temples.

EVA says

“I first saw him standing in the blazing sunshine outside my door; but the darting reflections from parched earth and stone walls, usually hard and glittering, had suddenly concentrated in light which was not glittering at all. He seemed at ease in the intense brightness; and even after he had walked through the strip of sunlight in the center of my room into the shadow of its edge, he retained the glow which at first had appeared to be the reflection of the sun in his hair.”

He was eating only honey. He said he’d been at it for a week.

(Man, preferably a beautiful one, sitting on stool or a stone bench eating a jar of honey with a spoon. Backlight radiates the outlines of the honey and the man.)

CHORUS

What kind of man eats only honey?

CHORUS LEADER

A man devoted to the nymphs eats only nymph-given food. Your tongue wakes in rapture.

CHORUS

It can speak all kinds of things? 

CHORUS LEADER

You open your eyes and it’s as if your tongue has been beaten by the nereids. Plus other deities of the waters. Language flows over it in excited atoms. Unformed stuff flowers and murmurs from its edges. Storms of meaning follow.

EVA says

It was Hymettos honey, from bees who feed on thyme.

(Beautiful man begins to eat the honey with his hands)

CHORUS

Thyme?

CHORUS LEADER

Yes, Time. 

CHORUS

How much does each mouth

Measure each word it

Speaks? Each letter

The length of an ant

Crawling from your tongue? Sound

Of its feet? Green

As a grasshopper wing dropped 

On concrete steps in a town on the plains? 

CHORUS LEADER

Speak plainly, please. 

CHORUS

What words greet your tongue?

Is the tongue or the word

The size and weight of white 

Egg-shaped stones from your home-

Town sea? Shape of a bee-shadow thinking

I will not sting, I will not sting?  What

Are the words she heard when he

Spoke, from his Greek

Honey-eating tongue? 

Body of a man?

Below the mouth, the throat. 

Below the throat, the heart.

From the heart to the stomach where

ideas are born. The stomach, once

the realm of sharks (where humans 

were born), leading down

the dark blood waters where

—What is that

lodged beneath the ribs? The sound of olive

pits rattling in a tin. Flower-

mouth speaking flowerlight? Stop!

(The man begins pouring honey directly into his mouth. Does she approach him? Does she kiss him?)

EVA says

Speak to me only in words that resemble the buzzing of bees!

DESCENDANT

She had been sleeping under the Greek stars in the half-made house when in walked that man. She had already met that man’s sister. As if her affection has moved between figures like a knight switching places on a chess board.

CHORUS

But not so strategic. 

DESCENDANT

Just the strange revolutionary strategies of the heart. 

Which flows into art.

EVA says

At first I tried to sleep in one of the small cells around the courtyard, but it had recently been used as a sheepfold and I wasn’t used to those smells. I took my blankets out into the open air.

She says

Raymond, with his carpentry, has arranged the place very nicely. He’d built four long, narrow couches against the stone walls, each covered in bright Greek blankets, with round pillows, so that you could comfortably rest an elbow while eating. In the growing chill of evening, Penelope had lit a great fire. And she had prepared delicious herbs and greens, yet Angelos still ate nothing but honey.

At that supper I heard Angelos and Penelope talking in Greek for the first time, and I was delighted and heartsick. The sound of it was amazing, but I felt cheated, as if they had filched from me something most precious. I longed to speak that language too. Angelos spoke little English and I little Greek at that time, so our conversation was in French. Even years later, when I spoke Greek with everyone else, I did not dare say a word in Greek to him.

She says

The next morning, he spoke of the spiritual centers around the world that reached beyond national or ethnic or racial boundaries, that connect us still. Delphi, Eleusis, Jerusalem, Karnak, Brindaban. Of creative force and spirit as the bridge. He spoke of our age as an age of spiritual dismemberment. Of time dreamlessly sleepwalking. How could we wake people to the great impersonal memory of earth, whose rhythms they already knew but whose sounds had grown faint? 

ANGELOS interrupts

Let me tell it! 

Earth is worth more even than the people because Earth is the mother of all the people’s descendants and rhythms. But the people are the legitimate heir to the accumulated struggles and blessings of all previous centuries, without exceptions.

EVA continues

He longed to make something beautiful, something real, to destroy the bitterness and barriers separating people and peoples. So much of what he said reminded me of what my father and mother had taught me. To abolish the death penalty. Equal political rights for women. Raising the material level of the uneducated classes. That all humans, from every direction, are connected, and this teaching draws its vital powers, like a universal family tree, from the entire history and the entire expanse of the Earth without exception. How he talked! Later, he talked about the ancient sanctuary at Delphi, which brought friends and enemies from East and West together into a league of neighbors—a model of the kind of university he wanted to build. He said we could see into the far reaches of antiquity as something living that connected to the present moment through long and invisible threads. That was something I myself had already sensed, but I didn’t say so.

*

I have smelled the smell of gallons of honey being poured into a mouth, and it smells like the breath of the bee, if you could say “bee” and “honey” in one word. The scent of wax in the golden thread breaking as it hits air. All that bee-work spilling into the mouth, and we smell not the human but the bee’s nectared endeavor that the bees themselves passed mouth to mouth.

Born in California on Walt Whitman’s birthday, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, and "a master of mixing genres." She grew up in earshot of the ocean, in small coastal towns near Santa Barbara, and has since lived in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Athens (Greece), Boulder (Colorado), and Providence. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral lineages. Your Kingdom (Winter 2023) will be her tenth book of poetry, riding alongside two memoir-verse-image-novels.