by Linda Bierds
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 brickwork floor repeated its image.
Again and again and again.
As all we have passed through sustains us.
The Suicide of Clover Adams: 1885
All the bodies like fallen cattle.
And the snub-brimmed caps. The war. Civil.
Brady’s shadow, at times, rinses a photograph
with its black pond. But the image I keep
is a blasted meadow. Burdock, bloated sacs
of lungwort. And up from the earth’s fresh trough,
I think, the mineral scent of ripped grasses.
Henry slumps in the grip of a toothache.
If I were real, I would help him. But I
am the fabric of well-water—slick and transparent—
my voice a bird where my shoulder should be.
In the Doctrine of Signatures, each plant
cures the body it mimics.
So the liver-shaped leaves of hepatica
temper the liver’s jaundice, and snuff
from the snapdragon’s tapered neckline
heals the tubular body of the human throat.
Heart leaf and toothwort.
Steam from the kettle
has cast a late dew on the ladles.
And a privacy to each of the windows.
In print after print, Brady centered the men
facing east. The sandbags and cannons.
One midday, I centered our cousins with an eastward
glance, fresh for the incoming hour.
In the darkroom musk, they
rose through potassium baths
with the languorous ripples of flounders …
Steam. Its simmering mist.
If I were real, I would offer a flower. But I
have taken a body of water, stirred
through with cyanide salts. Slick and transparent,
they stroke their signature to the echoing self.
Which is nothing. And from which
nothing rises at all.
Vespertilio
Julia Margaret Cameron
Like winter fog, the coal dust climbs her stockings,
although the coal itself has long departed, tumbled
barrow by barrow to an alternate shelter.
She scrubs the floor, sets across the gaping boards
square vats of rank collodion, of alcohol
and pyrogallol. Still the coal dust blooms,
until her apron darkens and her hem-strokes
brush to the path’s pale stones
a soft hieroglyphics. She has walked
to the glass henhouse and bundles the hens
to their new roost, one wing at her breast, one wing
in her hand, the stiff legs riding her forearm.
Their livingness, she says, touching
a wattle and ruby comb, the tepid feet that stretch,
then curl, like something from the sea.
So the coalshed becomes her darkroom
and the henhouse welcomes the bent Carlyle,
Darwin and Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow,
each posed near a curtained backdrop, each
sharp in his livingness: a glaze of amber earwax,
a leaf of tobacco like ash on the beard.
But the portraits … Unfocused, critics say. The lens
stepping down into fog. Aberrant. Distorted. Although
she prefers Undefined, as in Not yet captured
by the language of this world. They are rich
with the inner, she answers, with a glimpse of the soul
flapping up through collodion baths,
darkly transparent, like the great bats
that flap near the henhouse windows. She watches them
break at dusk past the tree line
then flash at the windows and flash, as if
they are seeking their lost counterparts—although
they are not birds, of course, but dense with wings,
so dense the sleek, half-opened wings
would cover a wattle, a comb, and opening, easily
cover the back, the breast,
and easily opening cover the tail,
the yellow, tepid, stretching feet: like
a dark sea spreads over its garden.
Six in All
Four
The pulpit lilies gaped and dipped. The coffin’s velvet
cast its nap in variative strips, as wind
might cast a summer’s wheat. Asleep, they said,
she looks asleep—if sleep can suck the cheek skin down,
can still the lids to bone. I think
she had six words in all. And so she thought
in reds and whites, in hard-spun
roundnesses. One afternoon,
my father pressed her fingers to his pipe, breathed in,
exhaled, breathed in, that she might feel, like
some enchanted heart, the pipe bowl flare and ebb.
From that time on, she tracked its brier flutterings,
and all the spheres about her: the rigid arc
of radishes, the nurse’s knees
that rose and sank beneath her white-knit stockings
like tandem bellies of dying fish.
On the pane beside my sister’s face,
the glass-plate negative reveals a soldier
dead for weeks, or starved before his death,
his belly just a sunken sling between the bracket
of his hips. Above it all his stiffened belt
orbits like a jester’s hoop. The hoop and then a gap
of air, and then the bones of him. And
to the right, in sawgrass and a twining vetch,
his cup and round canteen.
“Death’s thimbles,” Father called the cups,
the way they steered to softer cloth
a bullet’s leaded point. Invisibly the soldiers ran,
until the moonlight caught the cups, until
each pockmarked curve of tin
flared its dimpled bull’s-eye.
And so we die of glimmer after all.
Jane’s nurse was kind, but by her presence
verified the death at hand. We longed each night
to watch her lift her cape, drape its hood across
her hair, step into the field. The night absorbed her
instantly, the open, blue-black flapping cape
no more than tree limb, shrubbery. Departing,
she was just the world, the way the world
recedes at night. Then at the ridge
she turned to wave
and flashed her ghastly whiteness back at us.
Edison: 1910
Dressed in an ebony suit,
could the soul of William James, they asked me, slip
past the bakery counter, his slack lapels
dusty with flour? Or walk on the cobbles
in those soft shoes? It was God, of course,
not James they questioned. And No, I said, No
suit, no Deity. We are the finite, meat-mechanisms
of matter. The uproar then! He was seen—dark shoes,
trousers—all the newsprint dripping with sightings!
Look down to your own shoes, I told them. There,
in the fluoroscope’s green wash, your Inmost Essence
flexes. I remember Dally in his white coat,
week after week, bent
to the X-ray’s beam, to the bloat
of ghostly photos, as the peephole burned its round tattoo
on his brow and cheekbone. How the beam itself
nibbled him—fingers, toes, hair, spleen.
A lantern through dust, he whispered, is a kind of gill.
It was Wednesday, a week from his death, some
childhood dust storm storming again.
He spoke of its wind and the launched soil,
the anemone-sway of the darkened sheep, as slowly,
heads dropped, they crossed, recrossed
the smallest arc of battered turf.
And lamplight in the barn,
although it was midday. And although it was midday
the sunset began. Crimson, he said,
just over the sheep, just over the alders, the yellow
sweep of hedgerow. And false, of course, some light
at play on the facets of dust. But … wonderful,
he told me. His bones on the fluoroscope’s pale screen
tapered and flared, the nodules of toe-tips
black, protrusive, like ghastly buds—a presence
that walks with us always, I think, flexing its grip
invisibly. And that visible sunset he fashioned,
slumped on its false horizon?
Some vibrant, wind-churned absence,
defined by dust and reverence.
Muybridge
These are the names of the horses:
Occident. Elaine. Abe Edgerton. Clay.
With a shutter’s quick clickings, I stopped them,
then dealt the divine and its opposite, picture
by square picture: the unwinged body in flight—
two hooves pushing off, then one, then none—
and the pact of that flight: groping forelegs,
the horn-sheathed toes thrust out like cane tips.
Time after time, from the beauty of motion
came the pickets of stasis! And yet,
I remember the heart of a snapping turtle,
grotesque in its florid two-step. We had peeled back
the breastplate, dragged the body by cart past the eyes
of twelve cameras, the cart wheels tripping the shutters.
I could not watch the motion then, but
turned instead to the open mouth, the palate ridged
like a walnut shell, turned instead to the static photos—
where something, hollow and weightless, a poppy perhaps,
where something twelve times, like a poppy,
was pressed and released by a rhythmic wind.
I stopped the pine snake and horse. Or better,
I held them. Field cat. Hawk. The wake
of a coastline steamer.
In a northwest harbor one autumn, I watched a meadow
flood to a cranberry pond. Then a man with a rake
pulled the blunt berries from their soft vines.
They floated around him, filling the surface,
red and amber and that last yellow before it is red.
He stood in the pond, and the berries, like evening,
absorbed him, his boots and thighs. They covered each
glisten of the water, until only the sharpest shining
survived, where the rake cut a path through the redness.
What would I hold? All. Almost all. The poppy
in its soft backdrop. The hawk. And the horse,
the great weight on the last hoof,
then the lifting of that weight.
What would I stop? Only the path
of the rake, I think, that arc
reaching over the pond and the circling hour.
Only the need to reach over.
Six in All
Five
Along the foreground’s dusty scrub, a cello’s ice-white shadow
slinked toward my mother’s hem. Beyond the frame,
the army band was mute across the ground: one flute,
then thwirrs of shuffling cards, like pigeon wings.
And to the left the birds themselves,
the homing cotes and landing boards.
My parents posed against an oak, Jane’s carriage thick
beside them—no Jane at all, except for fists
that groped above the basket rim like pearly mums.
My mother smiled, leaned back across my father’s arm.
A soldier coughed. No war in sight, no long descent
from dampened bone, to human grain, to
just some frontal profile in the earth. And so,
when from the trees the little shape began,
arced toward us like some triggered stone, we held
our leisure. The bird stoked down, t
he burl of message
on its leg just words—although I think their secret
finished us. In time, hawk-ripped or ripped by shot,
still the pigeons stuttered back. I wondered
at their steadfastness. The jerking head, the shad-roe eye—
they seemed to crack through clouds
like energy and nothing more. Not drawn by words, of course,
but … what? The mate? The suet bead? The humid cote
or human hand? The chime of some vestigial song?
I cannot find the words for this. I think
of oaks, a shutter’s gape, the field drums
curved like calves across the ground.
Burning the Fields
1.
In the windless late sunlight of August,
my father set fire to a globe of twine. At his back,
the harvested acres of bluegrass and timothy
rippled. I watched from a shallow hill
as the globe, chained to the flank of his pickup truck,
galloped and bucked down a yellow row, arced
at the fire trench, circled back,
arced again, the flames behind
sketching first a C, then closing to O—a word
or wreath, a flapping, slack-based heart,
gradually filling. To me at least. To the mare
beside me, my father dragged a gleaming fence,
some cinch-corral she might have known,
the way the walls moved rhythmically,
in and in. And to the crows, manic
on the thermals? A crescent of their planet,
gone to sudden sun. I watched one stutter
past the fence line, then settle
on a Hereford’s tufted nape,
as if to peck some safer grain, as if
the red-cast back it rode
contained no transformations.
2.
A seepage, then, from the fire’s edge: there
and there, the russet flood of rabbits.
Over the sounds of burning, their haunted calls
began, shrill and wavering, as if
their dormant voice strings
had tightened into threads of glass.
In an instant they were gone—the rabbits,
their voices—over the fire trench,
into the fallows. My father walked
near the burn line, waved up to me, and from
that wave, or the rippled film of heat,
I remembered our porch in an August wind,
how he stepped through the weathered doorway,
his hand outstretched with some
book-pressed flower, orchid or lily, withered
to a parchment brown. Here, he said, but
as he spoke it atomized before us—
pulp and stem, the pollened tongue,
dreadful in the dancing air.
3.
Scummed and boxcar thin,
six glass-walled houses stretched beside our fields.
