Book Read Free

Flight: New and Selected Poems

Page 7

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.

 

‹ Prev