by Linda Bierds
oil slicks, water cans, now and then, a canary
in a wash of anthracite dust, each image
at once arriving, departing, at once
summoned, extinguished. When gasses crept out
through the drift tunnels, the sparks would thicken,
loll at the wheel, flush to the color of rubies, liver,
and be, it seemed, not fire at all, but a wreath
of some alternate element. And before he ran,
pushed by his father—and the other boys
ran with their fathers, calling through the corridors—
he watched at the flint wheel the stopped body
of light, how sparks could be stopped in the shapes
of their bodies, held there, it seemed, forever.
Middays they rested, the axes, the guttural rasps
of the flint wheels, silent. And his father told him
of legends, once of the sparrows of northern nations,
how they gathered by ponds in autumn, joined in a circle
wing to wing, foot to foot, and slowly sank into
the water. How they waited together through winter,
long ice pallets forming above them. And the villagers
stooped on the shoreline, watched through the ice
the chestnut bodies, silent in their still circle.
And waited for spring and the sudden rising,
the small birds breaking together to the yellow day.
But how could they eat there? he asked his father.
And breathe, with the water pressed over them?
They stopped, then began again with their rising.
In a wreath? As a single body they rose?
That is the story, his father said. Though
we think they rose as sparks.
Hunter
Plume-shaped and pampered, the flames
at the sitting room hearth are the color
of foxes: sharp amber
dropping down to a sobering port.
It is evening. A boy, Charles Darwin,
having listened as the undertaker’s workfellows
removed from the sickroom the body of his mother—
a little satin like wind at the door—
turns now to his father’s voice.
A story: the magnificent ears of musicians.
The young Beethoven, perhaps. How,
from the blindness of a sleeping mask,
he distinguished for his gathered diners
the clacket of forks from the clacket of knives.
A quick rain has begun at the window.
And now the story veers: An uncle once drowned
in the Derwent River, once walked through a night storm
to the storm of the current. And as the water
rises, as his father’s voice
approaches this alternate loss,
Charles studies the flames until they are foxes,
until they are called from the covert,
their sharp scent firm on the kale. Red coats
and the watery breeches. Black boots. And the ears
of the horses are cropped back to walnuts,
nubbled and sore—the long foreheads
just sloping away, sloping,
and the great eyes stark in their sockets.
A music begins then: deep bay
upon deepening bay, the loping hounds
dark and harmonic …
And could the uncle distinguish, his father is asking,
the drops of the storm from the drops
of the river? Just then, with his face
half hidden, half blossoming?
And could Charles distinguish, there in the wing chair,
grief from the story of grief? Or fear? Or love
from the story of love? And turn to it—
the grief, the love—harbor it,
however the story might buffer, whatever the loss?
As the man who stands in a yellow field
and takes to his lips a silent whistle,
and accepts that a sound is traveling, just over
the kale, just over the wind, and accepts
his place in some seamless extension,
even as, in a wave, the singing animal world
turns back to him.
Held
Silent, in the loose-fisted grip
of evening, he sits with his infant daughter
and makes from his face an exaggerated mask,
sorrow or glee, shock, the eyebrows launched
toward the hairline, the trenches of the forehead
darkening, so that she might learn—
following, mimicking—not only correspondence,
but a salvaging empathy.
And often in the chambers and drift tunnels
he gestures with the other miners. Deafened
by the strokes of the widow drills, he
offers that mime-talk, clear as the bell codes
for hoist, for lower. Cheeks drawn, the mouth
a tapered egg. Then he turns
in the lamplight, sees the tunnels
gauzed over with dust, feels
his lungs slowly filling, like the gradual
filling of rain ponds, and presses
the widow drill—named for his absence—
through the blue-black petals of anthracite,
through the bones and root-tips,
the shale-brindled cradle of the dead
and the flowering, as the earth
of the earth breaks away. Three thousand feet.
Four. His lungs slowly filling. But perhaps I am
spared, he wonders. Perhaps I am held
by this alternate world, cupped
■ ■ ■
and eternal. As once, just a boy, he stood
with his mother in the bath light.
Her white slip, the twin pallets
of her earrings. A fog of talcum
turned at the mirror. In joy
she delivered its snow to the air,
shake upon shake, smiling,
drawing from his own small mouth
the stunned, obedient smile of a guest.
Her face. Her arm in its little arc.
As if she were saying This
is the gesture for always as
the weightless powder settled upon them.
Westray: 1992
Then the day passed into the evening,
a sovereign, darkening blue. And
the twenty-six lost miners,
if living at all, knew nothing of the hour:
not the languid canter
of light, or the wind
curled through the hedgerows. Not pain.
Not rage. If living at all then
just this: a worm of black water
at the lower back. At the lungs
two tablets of air.
What is it like there? the broadcaster asked,
his voice and the slow reply
cast down through the time zones of America.
A stillness. All of the families
asleep in the fire station.
And the mineworks pale on the landscape.
What else?
Nothing. Blue lights of police cars.
What else?
Nothing.
Nothing?
… The thrum of the crickets.
A thousand files on a thousand scrapers.
A thousand taut membranes called mirrors
amplifying the breed-song. A landscape of cupped wings
amplifying the breed-song. A thousand bodies
summoned to a thousand bodies—and the song itself a body,
so in tune with the dusk’s warmth
it slows when a cloud passes over.
Today. Tomorrow. In that May Nova Scotia darkness
when the earth flared and collapsed.
Before that May. After that darkness.
On the larch bud. On the fire s
tation.
On shale and the grind-steps of magma.
On the gold straining in its seam bed.
On the coal straining. On the twenty-six headlamps
swaying through the drift tunnels. On the bud.
On the leaves, on the meadow grass,
on the wickerwork of shrubs:
dark cape of desire.
Desire
1.
Where the Stillaguamish River cuts down
through the mountains, winds under the summits
of Forgotten and Sperry, of Vesper and Morning Star,
six miners have stepped from their darkened tunnels—
the ore carts stopped on their aerial tramway, the silver
at rest in the spines of railcars. It is a night
of a closer century. Their headlamps dapple
the clearing they cross. Now a robe of bats,
migrating westward, calls them to question
the black sky. And their headlamps lift,
all in one motion, one full beam lighting
the wings, the small, unwavering heads.
2.
My father sat in a sunlit chair
and watched the field birds near the Stillaguamish.
He had on his chest, like a bandage, a small
nitroglycerin patch, and on his wrist, like
another bandage, the untanned shadow
of his watch. The birds turned
in the blossoming bulb fields, and Look,
he said, how the leader retrieves them, drawing
them with him in a single stroke, how
the white stomachs flash in unison
as the flock, in unison, rises and dips.
3.
When I was a girl, we followed the river
to its exit in the port, then the port
to the open sea. I would wake with my family
to the sound of two horses, their hoofs on the boardwalk
near our cabin window, and the lumber bolts
clinking like bells. The boardwalk spilled down
to an outsweep of beach, where the horses
were anchored to a purse seine net. I remember
their list as they walked to each other,
dragging the net to its plump conclusion,
all the herring and candlefish, the junk fish,
the wayward salmon, turning together, flashing
together in the early sun. And although
we knew they traveled to us
by a net of our own making,
still we stood spellbound in their unified light.
Flood
In that gill-light of late autumn evenings,
the valley children had crept through the corn rows,
two miles of withering tassels, styles, of leaves
cocked like the flaps of a fool’s cap—had crawled
from the gap of the access lane, out
down the rabbit paths, lanky, long-abandoned stalks
the perfect maze. We were parked by the roadside.
Six cars, seven. To the west, the wide
Stillaguamish River swelled to a bay.
Far behind us, the children in the cornfields stood—
no hood, no grit-dusted cap breaching the tassel line—
stepped left, some right—just a ripple, just
a ribbon in the stalks—turned, turned again,
the chirrup of their voices thickening, darkening,
until the quick fear they courted flared and stung
and someone on a step ladder—mother, uncle—
swung a cowbell in a beckoning arc
and homed them all. We were parked by the roadside.
Coffee, the crackle of short-waves. To the west,
the wide Stillaguamish reached over the stop signs,
reached into the eaves of outbuildings, saddles
and private treasures glistening, lifting,
dollops of burlap like jackets in the waves.
On a table-sized island, two Guernseys turned
in a thicket of snowberry, muzzle to tail. As their hoarse
voices collapsed into the brays, the wild rain began,
resumed. Water to water. And across the surface
of this new bay, across the pedestal of the rain,
the spawning salmon—steelhead, chinook—having
lost the borders of the river, shuddered and leapt,
thrust in through the mustard fields, through rooftops
and the pivoting sentries of weathercocks, their fins,
the long seams of their bellies stretching, dipping—seeking
one thick current to resist.
Seizure
When his eyes took the half-sheened stillness of fish roe,
he tightened his helmet, cinched its inner cap of
canvas straps until the dome above wobbled, swayed
with a life of its own. We were not to touch him,
he said, but wait on the sidewalk until his soul returned.
His hat had a decal that captured light
or hissed out a glow when the light diminished. We were
not to touch him, but watch the ballet of his arcing arm
as he opened the fish, the chum and ponderous king,
flushing the hearts, the acorns of spleen. We were young
together, fourteen or fifteen, and still he returned
to the fish houses, his sharp hands working the knives,
disappearing in flaps of cream-tipped flesh that
closed like a shawl. He showed us the opaque archings
of ribs, brought into our schoolroom the weightless gills,
book-pressed and dried, the spine he had saved that
snapped apart into tiny goblets. We saw him one night
fallen by the river—saw the light from his helmet,
that is, lurching in the long grasses, slicing its
terrible path like a moth grown fat and luminous:
if what flashed there could be seen as a body,
could be stopped in the human hand.
The Skater: 1775, Susannah Wedgwood at Ten
He would come, Darwin, in a yellow-wheeled chaise,
past the mine shafts and whim gins, the bottle kilns,
past the patchwork of geese on the carriageway,
and counsel her father on the treatment of gums,
of eyelids, or the maddening rasp
in the knee, his long physician’s bulk
trembling the floorboards as he walked.
She would stand by his chair
to study his face, his skin with its smallpox scars—
each cupping, she felt, a grain of the finest pepper—
how his chin pulled back as he stammered
his verses: the t’s and c’s, the shivering n’s:
From Nature’s coffins to her cradles turn …
how his fingers resolved into slender tips,
tapered like formal candles.
He brought to her once
two sheep-jaw skates, fearsome and splendid
in their muslin pouch, the teeth in brackets
on the leather boot soles, each jawbone below
filed to a blade. And walked with her then
to the winter pond, the white shrubs
with their blossoms of crows. The teeth were chewed
to a biscuit brown, with streaks of white
where the grasses ran. And the grinding fissures,
spidered like glass, chafed her a bit
when she touched them. Hang o’er the gliding steel,
he recited, and hiss upon the ice …
his words a series of quick clouds
as she circled before him, gliding in fact
on bone, not steel, with the sound of her strokes
less a hiss than a breathing, as if
the lost world resurfaced there.
Dark girl, pushing off with each high-laced boot.
Then the teeth, the
n the bone, then the mirroring ice.
Lautrec
Often I fished with my cormorant, Tom,
who would, through wing dips and shudders, identify
the schools. I remember the knots
on his tepid legs, where skin rippled up from the bone,
and the parallel pickets of his shoulders—
how their pivots found echoes
in my knuckles, when I plucked from the sleeve
a granule of ash.
The figure is all, and the figure in motion.
When I opened the fish there were glimmers of
roe, which in turn I turned over
in my study of English: to the deer,
and some dark blemish in mahogany,
in the spill of its quartersawed grain.
How wind through the lips can create such a trio:
fish egg, and doe, and a dapple in wood!
From birth,
my legs held the pliancy of glass.
And shattered, finally, reducing my life to a hobble.
As a boy, rising up from the low chair, I felt
a shin bone buckle and split—a pain,
I assume, like the flare a mollusk must feel, dropped
in the boiling soup. Then the stunned mouth,
all in one motion, closing and opening.
As I fell, I saw in the polished grain of the table
the static figure: roe.
When I was insane, I earned my release
with a family of paintings. A circus. From memory.
Demanded from memory. As if the functioning mind
is one that imagines. There were gymnasts
and scarves. And once, on their sides
in a center ring, a woman and horse.
They lay facing each other like lovers, or
the twin lobes of the heart. At the sound of a whistle
each would roll over, roll away, the delicate
legs of the horse flailing a little, stroking the air,
the great body below gathering, shifting,
as a galaxy shifts in its black cabin.
Just before they turned over, each
to a separate world, there is a moment
captured in my painting, an instant,
when the shoe of the woman—its cloud of taffeta bow—
reaches out to the answering hoof of the horse.
Her foot—then, in the distance of
reflection, his: as if he, in some fashion,
were her magnificent extension,
and gave to her eyes what my cormorant saw,
as he entered himself in the passing waters.
Care: Emma Wedgwood Darwin, 1874
With pen nib and glass, on a lozenge-sized leaf,
my husband has counted the two hundred thirty
plum-hued filaments of the sundew plant.
To his left, right, with equal attention,
our sons are sketching each shivering pedicel,
each sap-bloated gland. The coronal splay
