Flight: New and Selected Poems
Page 3
in the concave crooks of their shanks,
the mules, centered and pushed—
and then it was all restored.
Soon the nut pines yielded to scrub pines, the wind
to the screams of the handcarts—
wooden axles, wooden wheel hubs,
day after day, the haunting, wooden voices.
Now and then, the lowland flashed up
through the trees, russet and gold-filled:
Ophir, Mineral Bar, the American River. Then
the scrub pines gave way to the black oaks, the wistful
manzanitas. On the bank of a river-fork
someone knelt, pinched the gravel,
plump and auriferous. Two others
talked of their journey, and the journey
of gold, of their last descent and that climbing:
fold-fault and lifting, erosion,
glaciation, explosion,
the magma and silica scratching upward,
pin-step by pin-step to meet them.
All night the rain washed over the wagons,
cut down through the wheel ruts and fire-pits,
the powdery topsoil, as if to say
Deeper, just a little deeper,
and in the morning, pulled up in the muzzles
of mules, dangling in the grassy root-tips,
that gold dust, that ending.
FROM Heart and Perimeter (1991)
The Shakers
Picture a domino. A six perhaps, or placid
four. And resting upon it, like the grids in some
basement windows, three thin vertical lines.
This is a staff—for the dance notations of Rudolf Laban.
Torso twists, step turns and wrist folds,
gallops, jumps, all the motions
a body might make—in space, in time—
contractions, rotations, extensions, from head tilt
to the crook of the left thumb’s outer segment,
spatter the staff in symbols. Black dots
and miniature boxcars, tiny rakes
for the fingers, double crosses for the knees,
the right ear’s sickle, the eyebrow’s mottled palette,
each intricate sketch on its half inch of grid line—
until a string of speckled rectangles
might tell us a foot was lifted,
set down at a slant on the metatarsus,
as a man might step down a path of loose stones.
In the late-morning light, on the road to New Lebanon,
his elbow jumps with its bucket of lake bass.
Now and then, a whistle begins, spreads
into song, then the slack-cheeked slip into piety.
By midday his movements are rhythmic,
have become this dance passed down
through the centuries, then trapped in a patchwork
of labanotation. Two circles: one men, one women.
Stage left, a singer, a pulse of percussion.
The music begins and the circles are carriage wheels,
then closer—almost touching—are the black-specked wheels
of a gear: one men, one women, in turn almost
touching, then the arms flung up in denial,
the bodies flung back into rippling lines,
fused, yet solitary, like a shoal of lake bass.
If there were lanterns then, they are lost here,
and smoke, the odors of sawdust, linseed.
But the costumes are true—white bibs and transparent
skullcaps, each foot in its column of black boot—
and the dancers strive with an equal devotion,
as if the feat of exact repetition were a kind of
eternity. Black dots and miniature boxcars.
Step here, they say, just here. And a foot is lifted,
a quick smile answers, This is enough, this striving—
daylight as it is with its sudden rain,
all the pockets of loose stones glistening.
For the Sake of Retrieval
As Whistler heard colors like a stretch of music—
long harmonies, violet to amber, double hummings of
silver, opal—so, in reverse, these three in their capsule,
free falling two hours through the black Atlantic, ears
popped, then filled with the music of Bach or Haydn,
might fashion a landscape. Low notes bring
a prairie perhaps, the sharps a smatter of flowers,
as the pip notes of sonar spring back to the screen
in little blossoms. They have come for the lost Titanic
and find instead, in the splayed beam of a headlamp,
silt fields, pale and singular, like the snow fields
of Newfoundland. On its one runner blade the capsule slides,
slips out through drift hummocks, through
stones the Ice Age glaciers dropped, its trail
the foot-thin trail of a dancer, who
plants, glides, at his head the flurry
of a ship’s chandelier, at his back a cinch-hook of icebergs
cast down through the winds of Newfoundland.
The music these three absorb
stops with the wreckage, with words
lipped up through a microphone:
flange, windlass, capstan, hull plating, then oddly, syllables
at a slant, as light might slant through window slats,
stairsteps, doorknob, serving bowl, teacup, Bordeaux.
Mechanical fingers, controlled by the strokes
of a joy stick, brush over debris, lifting, replacing.
In jittery strobe lights, camera lights, all colors
ground down to a quiet palette,
angles return, corners and spirals
pull back to the human eye—as if from some
iced and black-washed atmosphere, boiler coal,
a footboard and platter, each common shape
brightened, briefly held for the sake of retrieval.
The current spins silt like a sudden storm.
With the intricacy of a body the capsule adjusts,
temperature, pressure. Someone coughs, then the three
sit waiting, as in Whistler’s Sad Sea
three are waiting. All around them are dollops
of winter wind, everywhere beach and sea. No horizon
at all in this painting, just a grey/brown thrum
beach to sea. How steady his breath must have been
on the canvas, his hands on the brushstrokes
of lap robes, of bonnets and beach chairs, the pull
of a red umbrella: each simple shape
loved and awash in the landscape.
April
A little wind. One creak from a field crow.
And the plow rips a shallow furrow, hobbles
from guide-stake to guide-stake,
draws its first contour line,
and parallel, its next, next,
then the turn-strips and deadfurrows, the headlands
and buffer lines, until the earth from a crow’s vantage
takes the pattern of a fingertip.
And by noon the shadows are gridways: cut soil,
the man on the plow, the plow and simple tail,
each squat on a stretch of slender shade,
black and grid-straight, like the line of anti-light
a screen clicks up to, before its image
swells, deepens. Dark glass
going green, in the shade-darkened room
of a laboratory—it casts a little blush
across the face there, the shoulders and white pocket,
then magnifies the moon-skin of a microbe, then deeper,
electron molecules in a beam so stark it smolders.
The man on the plow fears frost,
its black cancer. The man at the screen
fears the storm an atom renders
on the lattice of a crysta
l. And heat. And the slick
back-licks of vapor. With luck, with the patience
the invisible nurtures, he will reshape
frost-making microbes, snip frost-hook genes
with a knife of enzymes. And at thirty degrees,
twenty, through seam lines of snap beans, oranges,
almonds, potatoes, no frost will form, no ratchet-bite
of ice, all the buds of transformed microbes
blossoming, reblossoming, like the first flowers.
There is wind at the rim of the black-out shade.
One tick of the focus gears. Another. On a glass plate,
enlarged from nothing to filaments, the lines
of DNA wander, parallel, in tandem,
curled together past pigment blips, resin,
as the contour lines for autumn oranges
swerve in unison past boulder pods. The light
through the mottled skins of genes
is not light at all, but friction, caught and channeled,
like pigment caught in the scratch-marks of caves.
This was our world, the marks say: horse, maize,
vast gods drawn down to a palm print.
Drawn up from nothing the microbes gather,
a little wind on the curtain,
sun on the curtain’s faded side, on the crow and plow,
on the earth sketched perfectly to receive it.
Ringing
This thimble one, with a lentil clapper.
This one of shell.
These top-notched ones, for the harnesses of horses.
And these, for the fist-shaped, candle-spun
carousels of children. This one of the pear-shape,
this of the tulip, the fish mouth, the pomegranate,
the beehive. This room-sized one, stung
by four men in black braids, their arms
underhanding a muted log, in unison,
underhanding, casting the sanded log-tip
to the lotus-etched sweet-spot of the bell,
then again, underhanding in unison, like
the casters of waterbuckets, the ring and the splay,
and slowly, the child closes her book. A sound
has begun, just out from the window. A tap-scratch,
thwirr. Some rabbit, perhaps, trapped
in a shallow snare, great hind feet
plucking tufts from the crabgrass. She rises,
sits back in her soft chair, rises. Perhaps she will
witness a certain death, but the shelter of the book
is memory now, the path to the window
infinite, nothing, as she steps, stalls, steps, then
slips shoulder first to the waxy pane—and there
is her brother in the orchard below, casting stones
with a sling through the dense, brittle leaves
of the sugar maples. No targets at all there, no prey—
his small head tipped and attentive—just the pull,
release, then, long after, the answerings.
Bird in Space: First Study
Constantin Brancusi
Nothing grows in the shadow of great trees …
And yet, in a wine cask’s shadowy tube—oak aged
and curved to a first-growth trunk—
his legs inched up from his ankles.
He was sixteen, alone. By a storefront window
in Craiova, great breaths of chocolate
sighing out from a churn stick
held him. And the pattern of wheat dust
on silos, the pattern of corn
on a pulpy cob, like the grid marks in squid.
Hunger. Its spidery grip. And then he was hired,
dipped by the wrists into wine casks.
Small, slender—the restaurant above him
no more than a wind of garlic—he lathered, scrubbed,
all the pips slipping out from the rough-hewn wood,
all the bristle tips, esters,
and the odors of yeast, wet wool, the wine sludge
curved to the shape of his knees, his fingertips
curved to the oak blebs: body and barrel
in equal exchange—a melding, a kiss.
Days passed. A year. Often at dusk
he read cards at the restaurant tables, watched
the wide Rumanian faces swell, withdraw.
From the circle of Chariots, of Towers
and delicate Hanged Men, a fear would begin,
brushing up through each face like a wine flush.
Enigmas. The queer burbles of candle wax.
Then a cello spun out its long notes, binding,
cupping them all to the known earth,
as, morning by morning, the slats of an oak wine cask
cupped his small body. Sometimes
he sang there—cello songs, drawn down to the tempo
of bristle tips, splinters. Sometimes he studied
his hoop-slice of sky: looped from the ceiling, from
strings like the rays of geometry, amber onions,
three halved by the barrel rim’s sharp circumference,
beets and beet tufts, and, weekly,
the marbled hind legs of a roebuck.
Globe shapes, light-polished, or cragged
by a smatter of earth. Then weekly,
arcing into his view from a fuller body,
two thighs, two hocks, pulled tight at the hooves
by a thread of rawhide: pale form in a fixed arc,
like the memory of motion, like a bird stalled
in the ice-winds of space, its stillness, flight.
White Bears: Tolstoy at Astapovo
The wheels of the train were a runner’s heartbeat—
systole, diastole, the hiss-tic of stasis—
as they flipped through the scrub trees and autumn grasses,
slowing at last at the station lamps.
And perhaps the fever had carried this memory,
or the journey, or, just ahead in the darkness,
the white, plump columns of lamplight.
He is five, six, locked at the center
of the evening’s first parlor game:
Go stand in a corner, Lyova, until you stop thinking
of a white bear. To his left,
there is pipe smoke. Behind him
a little laughter from the handkerchiefs.
And in his mind, white fur
like the blizzards of Tula! He studies the wall cloth
of vernal grass and asters, a buff stocking, trouser cuff,
but just at the rescue of a spinet bench
two claws scratch back. A tooth. Then
the lavender palate of polar bears.
I cannot forget it, he whispers. And would not,
through the decades that followed—
the white, cumbersome shape
swelling back, settling, at the rustling close
of an orchard gate, or the close
of a thousand pen-stroked pages,
white bear, in the swirls of warm mare’s milk,
at the side of the eye. White bear,
when his listless, blustery, aristocratic life
disentangled itself, landlord to
shoemaker, on his back a tunic, in his lap
a boot, white bear, just then,
when his last, awl-steered, hammer-tapped peg
bit the last quarter sole.
In the gaps between curtains. And now,
in the lamp-brightened gaps between fence slats,
there and there, as if the bear
were lurching at the train’s slow pace,
and behind it—he was certain—the stifling life he fled
rushing to meet him: family, servants, copyrights,
just over the hill in the birch trees.
Simplicity. He sighed. Dispossession.
A monastery, perhaps. Kasha in oil. At eighty-two,
his body erased to the leaf-scrape of sandal
s.
And even the room near the station, the small bed
with its white haunch of pillow,
even the mattress, where he shivered
with fever or a train’s slow crossing, and whispered,
and, just before morning, died,
was better. Deep autumn. Already the snows
had begun in the foothills, erasing
the furrows and scrub trunks, erasing at last
the trees themselves, and the brooks,
and the V-shaped canyons the brooks whittled.
There and there, the landscape no more
than an outreach of sky, a swelling, perhaps,
where an orchard waited, then boundary posts, fence wire,
then, below, the lavender grin of the clover.
In the Beeyard
Clover-rich, lugged close to the thorax and twirring heart,
wax-capped, extracted, the viscid liquid
is not gold at all, but the color of cellophane, ice.
A little heat and its sugars may darken,
emerge, as fingerprints rise through a dusting of talcum,
but there in the dry-packed winter beehives
it is clear, the complex nothing of air or water.
And warm—although the orchard outside has slowly chilled,
snow on the windbreak, deep snow on the hives
in their black jackets. The honey is warm,
and the hive walls, and the domes of bearded wheat straw
tucked under tarpaper rooflines.
To nurture this tropic climate, the bees
have fashioned a plump wheel, clustered body to body
on honey cells, chests clicking out a friction, a heat—
faster, slower, in inverse proportion
to the day’s chill—while the hives
keep a stable ninety degrees, warm-blooded
as the keepers who cross through the beeyard.
They move with the high-steps of waders, a man,
his daughter. He clears blown snow from the hive doors.
She lowers her ear to the deep hummings.
Like mummies, she thinks of the cloaked rows, like
ghosts. Then salt pillars, headless horsemen
turned white by some stark moonlight.
In a flurry the images reach her,
their speed almost frightening, splendid,
as if the myths and fables of her life are a blizzard
drawn suddenly to her, drawn suddenly visible
through some brief interaction of
temperature, light. And the day itself then
swells a half-step closer: the sky and knotted
peach trees, her father’s thick form
smelling slightly of bacon. He turns
and a bowed ear blooms, backlit a moment
by the sudden sunlight, little veins and spiderings
plum-colored, then fuchsia, as a warmth spreads
over his face, her shoulders, over the windbreak