Flight: New and Selected Poems

by Linda Bierds

  They sink like yellow skulls,

  and then on the surface

  he sees the rippling legs of the woman,

  his own small face in its black topknot.

  A woodcock sings from a tangle of willow.

  The man thinks of his wife at the loom, how

  often in the late, thin light her beautiful arms

  cross and recross the breast beam

  with the strokes of a swimmer.

  There is pain in his shoulders, in

  his pale neck stretched

  over the basin. He thinks of a time

  when love, in terms of

  his place in the world, was everything.

  Erebus

  Even in the rigging there is chaos,

  the foremast and mainmast square-rigged,

  the mizzenmast and jibs fore-and-aft-rigged, so their lines

  cut in at slants, sharp and terrifying,

  like the slant-lights of the Scriptures.

  And their flurry is extended to the deck,

  where snow curls up with the chocks.

  By midnight the waterbuckets freeze, each claiming

  at dawn a wafer of thumbskin, peeled back

  from its slick under-mate like the eyelids of the dying.

  We are just below forty now: Franklin, Fitzjames,

  the surgeons, ice-master, thirty seamen, and cook.

  And a small bird the color of celadon,

  of the hummocks and fog-green fjords stumbling

  off from the shoreline. It carries just under a wing

  a circle of fuchsia down, blinking out

  now and then like our lost sun.

  Northwest Passage! Not even a harbor. Barrow Strait,

  Boothia, Cape Felix. And the days are lessening.

  We inch to the south as the icebergs themselves inch off

  from the main-pack: the crack and rustle,

  the slow letting go.

  What world is this that tightens under us—

  each time the wind recedes, freezes

  under us, leaving just our small bouquet

  of masts and grindstones, a hogshead of sugar?

  Now and then, ice-locked in this awkward

  and constant half-light, we walk over the floes,

  watch the simple flight-strokes of snow bunting,

  then carry their image to our own companion.

  It washes its wings in cabin air.

  As the fuchsia circle blinks out, again and again,

  we practice our game of resemblances, creeping

  closer to all we have been:

  God’s eye, someone offers. Or ember.

  Raw thumb! A taffeta underskirt.

  Or a blossom a bullet might leave,

  on its journey to a darker harbor.

  From the Ghost, the Animal

  Of all the figures in delirium tremens, the most common is the gray dog.

  Not the rat, then. We assumed it was the rat,

  scratching up not hell exactly, but

  the path there. We assumed

  it was the spider, leech,

  each in from its Gothic other, those zones

  with us and not, like sleep.

  But the dog, gray dog—

  flock-guider, companion for the slow

  rowing—pads in from the hallway,

  your life in tow.

  And please,

  there is something wrong with the light,

  this muzzle, honed to a trowel,

  its jab, retreat, this

  dirge through a smile of froth. Up

  from your ribs, lungs, up

  from the hollows you walk through—

  wind, black shoe, the sun at your eyelids,

  the simple bread—up from the ghost

  and the animal, you answer—bellow,

  hideous whine—while he slumps to the floorboards,

  clear-eyed, pants Run

  with me, darling, the meadows, the lost day.

  Wonders

  In a wide hoop of lamplight, two children—

  a girl and her younger brother—jump marbles

  on a star-shaped playboard. Beside them,

  in a chair near a window, their father

  thinks of his mother, her recent death

  and the grief he is trying to gather.

  It is late October. The hooplight spreads

  from the family, through the window,

  to the edge of a small orchard, where

  a sudden frost has stripped the fruit leaves

  and only apples hang, heavy and still

  on the branches.

  The man looks from the window, down

  to a scrapbook of facts he is reading.

  The spider is proven to have memory, he says,

  and his son, once again, cocks his small face

  to the side, speaks a guttural oh, as if

  this is some riddle he is slowly approaching,

  as if this long hour, troubled with phrases

  and the queer turn in his father’s voice,

  is offered as a riddle.

  There is the sound of marbles

  in their suck-hole journeys, and the skittery

  jump of the girl’s shoe

  as she waits, embarrassed, for her father

  to stop, to return to his known self, thick

  and consistent as a family bread.

  But still he continues,

  plucking scraps from his old book, old

  diary of wonders: the vanishing borders

  of mourning paper, the ghostly shape

  in the candled egg, beak and eye

  etched clearly, a pin-scratch of claw.

  A little sleet scrapes at the window.

  The man blinks, sees his hand on the page

  as a boy’s hand, sees his children bent over

  the playboard, with the careful pattern

  of their lives dropping softly away, like

  leaves in a sudden frost—how the marbles

  have stalled, heavy and still on their fingers,

  and after each phrase the guttural

  oh, and the left shoe jumping.

  Lesson: The Spider’s Eighth Eye

  These three things then: They have eight eyes.

  They have memory. Their images do not overlap.

  They leave the brood-cocoon when the last grains

  of yolk rattle in their pearly bellies.

  Each climbs a blade of grass, a twig,

  a splintering fence … anything sharp and solitary.

  Here they send a thread-hook for the wind.

  The launch is terrifying: Whipped to a current,

  gusted, their legs sucked behind at first

  like so much hair. But somehow they shinney,

  and they ride those gossamer V’s like arrowheads.

  This process—the launch, the travel—this is

  called ballooning. Some balloon for days.

  They are often found in a ship’s rigging

  hundreds of miles from shore.

  Or matting an airplane windshield, like cloud-frays.

  Those who survive live their lives where the current

  drops them. They do not balloon again.

  Now, finally, the eyes. They can not converge.

  One pair may see you—not as a face, exactly,

  but a pale avoidance—just as another sees

  the mantel tray, like a gold sun

  without heat or shadow.

  The eighth eye is tucked below, and has a range

  no higher than your knee. It sees only floors,

  soil, crackles of plaster. It is the memory eye.

  Sometimes when a draft gusts under the door,

  or wind whisks the porch, the eighth eye remembers.

  It is all very fast—just a spark, in fact:

  The wide rush of sea, perhaps a few whales below,

  like sun-spots. And then the great, flapping

  net of a sail
.

  Of course, the wind should be very brisk.

  But since there is memory,

  this is how it must be.

  The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp: Amsterdam, 1632

  High winter. All canals

  clogged with an icy marrow. And the flax—

  just a blue wash in the mind of

  the painter who puffs up the tower stairs.

  It is the time for festival—Aris Kindt

  is hanged. And soon

  up through these same stairs, up

  to the slope-seated deal and chestnut

  Theatrum Anatomicum, the surgeons will come:

  Mathys and Hartman, Frans, Adriaan,

  three Jacobs, then the bleeders and barbers,

  the wheelwrights, needle-makers, goldsmiths,

  the potters and sculptors, two

  thin-chested harehounds. A lesson!

  A dissection! All the reverent, mercantile faces

  peering off through the scaffolds

  that are now just empty, just a deal and chestnut funnel tapered down to a corpse: Aris Kindt. Quiver-maker. One necklace of rope-lace curled under his ears—while over his body, the shadow of a painter’s hat circles, re-circles, like a moth at a candle.

  So this is fresh death, its small, individual teeth.

  Rembrandt walks past the breechcloth, then the forearm

  soon to split to a stalk that would be grotesque

  but for its radiance: rhubarb tendons

  on a backdrop of winter. He swallows,

  feels the small dimplings of lunch pork

  drop away. And here will be Tulp,

  his tweezers and white ruff. And here,

  perhaps Hartman, perhaps the shadow of

  a violet sleeve closing over the death-face.

  It is commissioned: eight faces

  forever immortal, and one—slightly waxen—

  locked in mortality! He smiles.

  How perfect the ears, and the pale eyelids

  drawn up from the sockets

  like the innerlids of pheasants. Just outside a window,

  the day has climbed down to the amber color

  of this candlelit room. Rembrandt turns,

  crosses out past the sponges and vessels.

  There is the sputter of wagon wheels through a fresh ice,

  and in all the storefronts

  torches hang waiting for a pageant—

  scarlet blossoms for a new spring.

  His room has turned cold with the slow evening.

  Far off in a corner

  is a canvas clogged with the glue-skin of rabbits—a wash

  of burnt umber, and the whites

  built up, layer by layer.

  Now a fire, the odor of beets.

  And here, where the whites buckle, will be Tulp,

  perhaps Mathys, their stunned

  contemplation of death. He touches a spoon,

  then a curve of plump bread. All across his shoulders

  and into his hairline winds a little chill,

  thin and infinite, like a thread-path

  through the stars:

  there will be umber

  and madder root, yellow ocher, bone-black,

  the scorch of sulfur, from

  the oils of walnut and linseed—all things of the earth—

  that forearm, that perfect ear.

  Zuni Potter: Drawing the Heartline

  Through the scratch-strokes of piñon, the hissing

  arroyos, through the clamped earth

  waxed and swollen,

  coil to coil, paddle to anvil,

  the bowl on her palm-skin blossoms,

  the bowl on her lap

  blossoms, the lap blossoms

  in its biscuit of bones.

  Bract-flower, weightless, in the pock and shimmer

  of August, she slopes from the plumegrass like

  plumegrass. And the white skull

  bobbles and turns. The gingerroot fingers

  turn. Through the cocked mouth

  of a buck deer, she sketches an arrow,

  its round path nostril to heart.

  For the breath going in.

  For the breath going out.

  Wind to heartbeat. The blossoms of steam.

  Wedding

  from the painting by Jan van Eyck

  Wait. The groom stops,

  right hand in mid-air, mid-ceremony,

  about to descend to the cupped right hand

  of the bride. What is that noise?

  At their feet, the ice-gray griffin terrier stops.

  Two puff-shouldered witnesses just entering

  the chamber, just entering the scene

  through the iris of a convex mirror,

  stop. And follow a curling sight-path

  from the elegant to the natural: from the dangling

  aspergillum and single ceiling candle, down,

  past the groom’s velvet great-hat, his Bordeaux robe,

  past the stiff-tailed lapdog, the empty

  crow-toed wooden sandals, to

  a trail of yellow apples—desk, ledge, windowsill

  and out. There. Below. It is

  the rasp of water casks on the hunt mares, squeezed

  stave pin to stave pin, as

  they are shouldered across the canal bridge. And the mares—

  how brilliant in the high sunlight:

  one roan, one walnut, eight legs

  and the rippling ankles rippling again

  where the slow Zwin passes under. In a moment

  they will cross, step on with their small cargoes

  past inns, the great cloth halls steaming with linens.

  The mudflats have dried now. All their patterns

  of fissures and burls like the rim

  of a painter’s palette. Once or twice

  the cones of yellow flax straw will flicker,

  the autumn birch leaves flicker,

  the mares lurch left, then

  right themselves—nothing to fear after all: not wind, motion.

  Not even a sleeve of sackcloth slipped over the hoof.

  To quiet the hunt. To make from its little union

  not a predator, but a silence.

  Just the half-light of forests, black leaves

  on their withered stems,

  then the graceful, intricate weave closing over

  the mossy sole—as a hand might be closed

  by a descending hand,

  pale, almost weightless, and everywhere.

  The Klipsan Stallions

  Just one crack against the sandbar

  and the grain freighter crumbled into

  itself like paper in flames, all the lifeboats

  and blankets, the tons of yeasty wheat

  sucked down so fast the tumbling sailors

  still carried in the flat backs of their brains

  the sensations of the galley, smoky with mutton fat,

  someone’s hiccup, someone’s red woolen sleeve

  still dragging itself across their eyes

  even as the long sleeve of the water closed over them.

  It was 3 a.m., the third of November, 1891.

  Just to the south of this chaos, where the Columbia

  washes over the Pacific,

  there was shouting, the groan of stable doors,

  and over the beachfront, a dozen

  horses were running. Trained

  with a bucket of timothy to swim rescue,

  they passed under the beam of the Klipsan lighthouse,

  passed out from the grasses, alfalfa,

  deep snores and the shuffle of hooves,

  and entered the black ocean.

  Just heads then, stretched nostrils and necks

  swimming out to the sailors

  who were themselves just heads, each brain

  a sputtering flame above the water.

  Delirious, bodies numb, they answered

  the stalli
ons with panic—

  So this is the death parade, Neptune’s

  horses lashed up from Akasha!

  And still,

  through some last act of the self, when

  the tails floated past they grabbed on,

  then watched as the horses

  returned to themselves, as the haunches

  pulled, left then right, and the small circles

  of underhooves stroked up in unison. Here

  was the sound of sharp breathing, troubled

  with sea spray, like bellows left out in the rain,

  and here the texture of sand on the belly,

  on the shirt and thigh, on the foot

  with its boot, and the naked foot—and then, finally,

  the voices, the dozens gathered to

  cheer the rescue, the long bones of the will,

  causing hands to close over those rippling tails,

  yellow teeth to close over the timothy.

  Mid-Plains Tornado

  I’ve seen it drive straw straight through a fence post—

  sure as a needle in your arm—the straws all erect

  and rooted in the wood like quills.

  Think of teeth being drilled, that enamel and blood

  burning circles inside your cheek. That’s like the fury.

  Only now it’s quail and axles, the northeast bank

  of the Cedar River, every third cottonwood.

  It’s with you all morning. Something wet in the air.

  Sounds coming in at a slant, like stones

  clapped under water. And pigs, slow to the trough.

  One may rub against your leg, you turn with a kick

  and there it is, lurching down from a storm cloud:

  the shaft pulses toward you across the fields

  like a magician’s finger.

  You say goodbye to it all then, in a flash over

  your shoulder, with the weathervane so still

  it seems painted on the sky.

  The last time, I walked a fresh path toward the river.

  Near the edge of a field I found our mare, pierced

  through the side by the head of her six-week foal.

  Her ribs, her great folds of shining skin,

  closed over the skull. I watched them forever, it seemed:

  eight legs, two necks, one astonished head curved

  back in a little rut of hail. And across the river

  slim as a road, a handful of thrushes set down

  in an oak tree, like a flurry of leaves

  drawn back again.

  Strike

  First the salt was removed,

  then the axes and powderhorns,

  the blankets, jerky, shot-pouches, gourds,

  the kettles and muslin, the burlap torsos of

  cornmeal, and the wagons hauled on the coil of rope,

  hand over hand, up

  the last granite face of the High Sierra,

  dangling, wobbling fat in that wind like lake bass,

  then the oxen, pushed up the spidery trail—