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Authors: Linda Bierds

Flight: New and Selected Poems (7 page)

BOOK: Flight: New and Selected Poems
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Six in All
One
 
 
From balsa's weightless wood my father carved
the horse, then smoothed it to a foal,
then further still, into a kind of moon—horse yet,
and yet the head in soft relief was lunar, undefined—
 
as his is now, within the greenhouse wall. Erased
by my cousin's breath, perhaps, upon the plate, across
the damp collodion—his sigh or hum, some humanness
that hovers still, between my father's collarline
and globes of hothouse limes.
 
Two years beyond this negative, my father drowned
off Georgia's shore—so twice was slain by breathing.
They say on death the lungs accept the sea, inhale
its foreign element, the way I think the shutter's mouth
draws time inside to timelessness.
 
Before he died, he wrote that flocks of braying mares
were dropped by sling from battleships to waiting scows,
their stiffened legs like canes, he said,
the flashing cane-tips of their hooves.
 
“For those of us on wet-decked scows, a dozen times
they broke the sun, a dozen dust-caked underbreasts
cast their quick eclipse
. . .
”
 
And did I recall our balsa foal? From rye and fern,
from loops of waxy thread, how we wove her green arena?
“God, to have that footing now!—turf instead of
sickly sea, that swings me like some sling-strung beast.”
 
Within the plate glass negative, he waits
near summer larch: boots sharp, coat sharp, but face
dissolved to white. Across the plate's transparent sky,
the hothouse air has spawned an emerald scum,
a silken vegetation that spreads
its spidered reach. He stands below, coat sharp,
boots sharp, his head dissolved to cloud.
It will support him soon, the green.
The Three Trees
Late day. A wash of claret at the window.
And the room swells with the odor of quince,
tin-sharp and dank, as the acid creeps down
through the etch marks. He dips the foreground languidly,
Rembrandt, so thickets will darken, the horse
and lovers resting there, the bamboo latitude
of fishing pole, the shadowed river.
 
Then inks it all—mixed sky, three dappled trees—
and presses the intricate net of it
to the white-bleached etching sheet below: one skein
of storm aligning the nothingness, one haycart
rich with villagers. At the window now,
 
a fading to ochre. And beyond,
through the streets and valley, at the base
of a hillock thick with three trees, a hunter
is ringing a treble bell, its quick bite
driving the field birds to the sheltering grasses.
Around him, dark in their earth-colored clothes,
others are throwing a slack-weave net
 
out over the meadow and scuttering birds.
And up from their various hands, quick fires bloom,
rush through the beard grass, the birds bursting up
to the capturing net, some dying of fright,
some of flames, some snuffed by the hunters
 
like candles. A breeze begins, slips through the tree limbs.
Slung over each hunter are threadings of birds,
strung through the underbeak. Pleat-works of plenitude,
down the back, the curve of the shoulder.
They offer their warmth in slender lines,
as sunlight might, through the mismatched shutters
of a great room, the long gaps casting
 
their cross-hatch. As if time itself might spin them all
down some vast, irreversible pathway—
haycart, hunter, small bowl with its blossoms of quince—
and the simple patterns resting there
barred everything back from the spinning.
Altamira: What She Remembered
That, chased by a covey of hunters, the fox
slipped into its den
exactly as bread slipped into her father's mouth:
white with a tapering backstroke of brown.
 
That the hunters at the den door
chopped and chopped with their black heels.
 
That the cave they revealed, child-sized but
humid with promise, ticked
with a placid rain, as if the weather
of the sky were the weather of the earth.
 
That she saw on the cave walls, in blue-black
and ochre, “the bulls,” although they were bison,
she learned, and a dipping hind.
 
That the borders of her body were the borders
of the weather.
 
That whatever awakened within her there—
not grief, not fear—had the sound
of hooves down a cobbled street.
 
That they lifted her back by one arm.
 
That, as she walked with her father
through the downland, the sound of the hooves
settled.
That whatever awakened within her there
had the sound of birds
flushed from the downland grasses.
 
Had the sound of leaves from a pitchfork's tines.
 
Years later, had the ticking sound of the rain.
Six in All
Two
 
 
“Now hold,” he said, his bloated word
afloat in the black-cloaked chamber.
And Mother stopped in profile. She had turned
to witness lifting moths, their thrum
across the oaks, then held to watch that tuft of air
 
that was the moths, empty yet filled
with tracks of the missing, like
the crease her cast-off headscarf left,
crown to milky ear. I stood outside the camera's frame,
 
near tables fat with yellowed shirts and vats
of crystal vinegar. Beyond the oaks, a soldier
worked against a plow, leaned back across
its harness straps, as if to cancel cultivation,
as if to close the trough that foamed before him.
His uniform was stiffened wool, his shirt fresh blue
against the field: half farmer still, half infantry,
a slanted shape that branched between
two worlds of burial.
 
My mother swallowed, saw the shutter spiral down,
her face a blend of dust and wonder—
that she might gather over glass, that she might claim,
across the flecks of bromide salt, some bygone self.
 
The sunlight cast quick glints against the plow,
across the rippling skins of vinegar.
My mother laughed, stepped forward
through the grass. Once she penned a note in vinegar's ink—
invisible, but for blisters wetness leaves. Like magic,
she said, how heat will mark each letter's path. Some greeting,
 
I think, her words so short-lived their birth
was withdrawal. We held the page to a candle's flame
and letters stroked up on mottled wings.
Then “Look,” she whispered, “their quickening shapes:
the thumb-plump, the sickled,
the branching-away
. . .
”
The Geographer
from the painting by Vermeer
 
 
There. Out the window. They are burning the flood fields.
And the light that touches his forehead
is softened by smoke. He is stopped in a long robe,
blue with a facing of pumpkin. In his hand,
the splayed legs of a compass taper to pin tips.
 
It is noon. Just after dawn, he took
for his errant heart a paper of powdered rhubarb
and stoops to the window now, half in pain, half
in love with the hissing fields:
 
mile after mile of cane stalks, fattened
with drawn water. Such a deft pirouette, he thinks,
flood pulled up through the bodies of cane, then
water cane burned into steam, and steam like mist
on the fresh fields, sucked dry for the spring planting.
 
Powdered rhubarb. Like talc on the tongue.
And what of this heart, this blood? Harvey writes
that the washes of pulse do not ebb, do not
flow like the sea, but circle, draw up to the plump heart.
And is that the centering spirit then? Red plum,
red shuffling mole? . . .
 
When the flood waters crested, the dark coffins
bobbed down through the cane stalks like blunt pirogues.
And then in the drift, one slipper
and the ferreting snouts of radishes.
He touches his sleeve, looks down to his small desk,
pale in its blanket of map, all the hillsides
and carriageways, all the sunken stone walls
reduced to the sweep of a pin tip.
They are burning the flood fields—such a hissing, hissing,
 
like a landscape of toads. And is that how blood
circles back in its journey, like water through
the body of the world? And the great, flapping fire, then—
opening, withering—in its single posture
both swelling and fading—is that the human heart?
Van Leeuwenhoek: 1675
All day, the cooper's hoops squeal and nibble.
Through the single eyepiece of his hand-ground lens,
he watches a spider's spinnerets, then the tail-strokes
of spermatozoa. Now and then, his bald eye unsquints,
skates blindly across his wrist and sleeve—
and makes from his worlds their reversals:
that of the visible and that of the seen . . .
 
Visible? he is asked, at the market, or the stone tables
by the river. The lip of the cochineal? Starch
on the membranes of rice? But of course—
though a fashioned glass must press and circle,
tap down, tap down, until that which is, is.
 
Until that which is, breaks to the eye.
It is much like the purslane, he tells them,
that burst from the hoofbeats of horse soldiers:
black seeds long trapped in their casings, until
the galloping cracked them. In the steppes, he says,
 
or veldt, where nothing in decades had traveled.
Then flowers burst forth from the trauma
of hoof-taps, and left in the wake of the soldiers
a ribbon of roadway as wide as their riding.
 
Smoke now. The screech of a shrinking hoop.
His thoughts are floral with hearth flames and soldiers,
the cords in his bent neck rigid as willow.
Then slowly, below, something yellow begins. Some flutter of
yellow on the glass plate, in the chamber of a tubal heart . . .
By winter, the snows crossed over the flanks
of the horses, felling them slowly. And the soldiers,
retreating, so close to survival, crept
into the flaccid bellies. Two nights,
or three, hillocks of entrails steaming like
breath. Now and then they called out
to each other, their spines at the spines
of the long horses, and the flaps of muscle
thick shawls around them. Then they rose, as a thaw
cut a path to the living.
 
. . . A flutter, yellow, where an insect heart ripples
in reflex. But no, it is only light and shadow, light
turning shadow. As the perfect doors, in their terrible
finitude, open and open.
 
He straightens, feels his body swell
to the known room. Such vertical journeys, he thinks,
down, then back through the magnifications
of light. And the soldiers, their cloaks
like blossoms on a backdrop of snow:
surely, having taken through those hours
both the cradle and the grave,
they could enter any arms and sleep.
Six in All
Three
 
 
That we could block these warring worlds—the native
from the fashioned—would make my mother flinch,
although she dips against the larch with languid
resolution, Jane in fever at her feet, my father
with his pipe bowl lifted, pinched,
as he might gently pinch
some brier sparrow into flight
. . .
that
on this greenhouse wall our faded wisps of family,
reduced to amber filaments, could keep
the cool and hot apart
. . .
 
At times when stark daylight recedes, my present face,
in pale reflection, bobs
near its childhood other—while under the dappled
layers of us, the slack-jawed orchids steam.
 
Two worlds. Or one, perhaps. Two rival
atmospheres. Once my father crept beneath the sea,
along some vein of miner's shaft. He told
how shaft heat sucked and swelled,
how pallid torsos of the men
 
gleamed like pulpit lilies. The icy sea so close above
a pin might bring it down, he said.
Two dozen fathoms rushing by. Just overhead,
he heard the boulders shift and roll,
like great-boots pacing on his grave.
He tossed the brier bird—launched it into flame,
at least—then stepped into the war. Can you believe,
he wrote to us, a field of corn for camouflage?
The frightened soldiers, just stalks themselves
in cultivated blue, dipped and hid, or so they thought—
their crouching image everywhere, like evening
through some giant harp. The corncobs burst
and rained about them, the brindled, bullet-blasted
leaves. On one dead man, the kernels' milk
had glued thick corn-silk to his throat.
It swayed a bit in the August breeze, from
breastbone toward his shoulderline.
As I have seen some bloodless moss
sway from hothouse trees.
Shawl: Dorothy Wordsworth at Eighty
Any strong emotion tempers my madnesses.
The death of beloveds. William in his fever-coat.
I reenter the world through a shallow door
and linger within it, conversations returning,
the lateral cycle of days.
 
I do not know what it is that removes me,
or sets me again at our long table, two crescents
of pike on a dark plate. But memory lives then,
and clarity. Near my back once again,
our room with a brook at the baseworks,
its stasis of butter and cheese. Or there,
 
in a corner, my shawl of wayside flowers.
Orchis and chicory. Little tongues of birth-wort.
 
I remember a cluster of autumn pike
and a dark angler on the slope of the weir.
The fish in his hand and the roiling water
brought forth with their brightness
his leggings and waist. But his torso was lost
into shadow, and only his pipe smoke survived,
lifting, then doubling, on the placid water above him.
 
Often, I think, I encompass a similar shadow.
 
But rise through it, as our looped initials
once rose over dye-stained eggs.
We were children. With the milk of a burning candle
we stroked our letters to the hollowed shells.
And dipped them, then, in a blackberry bath,
until the script of us surfaced,
pale, independent, the
D
and cantering
W.
 
Then
C
for Christopher.
V
—William laughed—for vale.
And
P,
he said, for Pisces, Polaris, the gimballing
planets. And for plenitude, perhaps,
each season, each voice in its furrow of air . . .
 
Once, I was told of a sharp-shinned hawk
who pursued the reflection of its fleeing prey
through three striations of greenhouse glass:
the arrow of its body cracking first into anteroom,
then desert, then the thick mist
of the fuchsias. It lay in a bloodshawl
of ruby flowers, while the petals of glass
on the brick-work floor repeated its image.
Again and again and again.
As all we have passed through sustains us.
BOOK: Flight: New and Selected Poems
12.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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