Flight: New and Selected Poems

by Linda Bierds

  Inside them, lilies, lilies—

  a thousand shades of white, I think.

  Eggshell, oyster, parchment, flax.

  Far down the black-mulched beds, they seemed

  ancestral to me, the fluted heads of

  dowagers, their meaty, groping,

  silent tongues. They seemed

  to form perspective’s chain:

  cinder, bone, divinity …

  4.

  My father waved. The crows set down.

  By evening, our fields took the texture

  of freshened clay, a sleek

  and water-bloated sheen, although no water

  rested there—just heat and ash

  united in a slick mirage. I crossed the fence line,

  circled closer, the grasses all around me

  collapsing into tufts of smoke. Then as I bent

  I saw the shapes, rows and rows of tougher stems—

  brittle, black, metallic wisps, like something grown

  to echo grass. The soot was warm,

  the sky held smoke in a jaundiced wing,

  and as a breeze crossed slowly through,

  stems glowed—then ebbed—

  consecutively. And so revealed a kind of path,

  and then a kind of journey.

  Depth of Field

  Specula. Gauze in a halo of disinfectant.

  We sit in the small room, dimmed

  by the X-ray of my father’s chest

  and the screen’s anemic light. Because on film

  the spots are dark, my mother asks

  if, in the lung, they might be white: some

  hopeless sense of the benign. My father smiles.

  Outside the window, a winter storm

  continues. Across the park, the bronze-cast generals

  spur their anguished horses, each posture

  fierce with rearing. Nostrils, lips, the lidless eyes.

  Now all the flung-back heads have filled with snow.

  After-Image

  Three weeks past my father’s death

  his surgeons, in pond-green smocks, linger,

  trail after me from dream to porch, down

  the bark and needle pathway toward the river.

  One nudges me, explains, as he did weeks ago,

  the eye’s propensity for opposites, why green

  displaced their bleached-white coats. Looking up

  from the tablet of a patient’s blood, he says,

  the red-filled retina will cast a green

  on every white it crosses. A phantom wash

  on a neighboring sleeve. It startles us,

  he tells me. And: Green absorbs the ghosting.

  Then he is gone, the path

  returning to boot brush and the squirrel ratchets

  my father loved. It is noon, the sky

  through the tree limbs a sunless white.

  I have come to watch the spawning salmon

  stalled in the shallow pools. Age

  has burned them a smoky red, though

  their heads are silver, like helmets. Just over

  the mossy floor, they float unsupported,

  or supported by the air their gills have winnowed.

  I think I will gather them soon, deep

  in the eye, red and red and red,

  then turn to the canopy of sky and cedars.

  It will support them soon, the green.

  Six in All

  Six

  Behind my back, before my family, the elms

  have flared, dropped leaves, regathered them in tiny buds.

  Before me, behind my family, the limes are still,

  drawn out through shades of darkening

  by nothing more than light. Last night

  I read a tracker’s lore, half truth, I think,

  half wonderment—how, fleeing, one man mounted stilts,

  another fastened to his soles the stiffened gnarls

  of cows’ hooves. Such fussings over twists

  in dust! But beauty, too, that one can read

  a residue, that from the profile of a stride

  a body might be crafted.

  We’re faded now, my mother’s sleeve, my sister’s spidered

  fists. For someone standing next to me,

  we’re only hatchings on the glass, like

  hairline prints the heron leaves,

  its tracks across the sandy bank first shallow—here—

  then deeper as a fish was snared, then deeper still

  as, taking flight, it most was wedded to the ground.

  But I’ve described a positive, the darkened prints

  across the glass. In fact these hatch-lined negatives

  echo what was pale in us. And if the bird had truly walked

  in tandem with my family’s path, its tracks

  would yield a vacancy, like whitened lashes

  of the dead. In this inert, inverted world,

  what most engaged the passing light tumbled first

  to nothingness. My father lifts a brier pipe,

  a soot-black bulb reversed to ice.

  The stem, the bowl, the mouthpiece gone.

  It is his smoke that lingers.

  FROM The Seconds (2001)

  The Seconds

  Claude Laurent, glassblower, 1850

  With a flurry of sidestrokes, the March wind

  swims down the chimney, its air chafed

  by hearth smoke and bacon. It is sunset,

  and high on the inglenook shelf,

  a gauze of crystal flutes

  captures the lamplight. I am their maker—Laurent—

  eased back in a soft chair, listening

  to hearth logs sag through the andirons.

  And thinking of seconds—first time, of course, then

  the hapless devoted who step from behind

  with their handkerchiefs and swords, ready to give shape

  to another’s passion, as a body gives shape to a soul.

  When the handkerchief crosses the damp grass,

  they must wish it all back, the seconds:

  that the handkerchief rise,

  flap back to the hand, and the passion

  pull back to its source, as the sword and the pistol

  pull back to their sheaths.

  Then everything silent, drawn in by some vast,

  improbable vacuum—

  as an orchestra of ear trumpets might silence a room!

  Now the wall clock taps. Across my knees

  the house cat casts her rhythmic thrum.

  Once I lifted a flute, some second

  blemished by a loll in the lime, and blew

  through its crystal body a column of pipe smoke.

  I remember its hover just over my chest,

  a feral cloud

  drawn down and bordered, it seemed

  in that evening light, not by glass

  but by itself.

  Seconds and smoke …

  Into what shape will our shapelessness flow?

  Outside my window,

  two children bob in the late light,

  walking with their mother on the furrowed fields.

  They love how their shadows

  are sliced by the troughs—how, over the turned rows,

  their darkened, elongated shapes

  rush just ahead in segments, waving

  their fractured sleeves. Now their mother

  is laughing, lifting her arms and pale boot,

  watching her sliced and rippled

  shadow—whose parallel is earth, not she,

  whose shape is taken not by her, but the cyclic light

  her shape displaces. Now her head,

  now her shoulder,

  now the drop of her long coat

  have stretched to some infinite black bay

  pierced by the strokes of a black swan.

  “Will You Walk in the Fields with Me?”

  Early dueling challenge

  They are matt
ed with frost

  and a porous cloth that is the season’s first snow.

  The fields. The seconds.

  And the firsts, of course, their manored lords.

  Seen from above in the dawn light, the burgundy,

  snow-dappled cloaks of the lords

  are two cardinal points of a compass,

  its jittery needle defined

  by the segmented footprints of sixteen paces.

  It is the moment after turning. No one has fallen,

  one bullet passing through a hat brim, the other

  entering a birch tree with the sound

  of a hoof through shallow ice.

  At their fixed points, the lords wait. Winter wind

  sails through their cloaks. They have entered the dawn

  carrying no more than a sense of self, the magnetic pull

  of decorum, and stand now, smiling a little,

  satisfaction obtained by a hat brim,

  by a birch that shivers in the early light, as

  the seconds do, stomping in place in the snow.

  They have entered the dawn carrying, in fact,

  two bladders of salve, tourniquets browned

  by an aging sun. No selves at all, they

  are empty, waiting to be called, waiting to step forth

  in another’s image—the hat plume and cloak,

  after his likeness, the footfalls and trembling. Waiting,

  with his grace, to make their turn,

  while deep in the dawn’s new day, a little

  circle of darkness draws a heart-high bead

  and the beasts of the fields stand steaming.

  The Last Castrato

  1904

  Buoyed by light, the gaping, bronze recording horn

  floats near his upturned face, near his lips

  that echo in their opaque sheen

  the wax now turning at the horn’s slim tip.

  He is offering Hasse’s aria—pale suns in the misty heavens,

  the tremblings, the hearts. But the stylus slips

  on the low notes and fricatives until only

  something like emblem remains, a pale, une’en art

  etching the cylinder’s tranquil curl. And so

  he is asked to compromise: the lowered tongue, the softened

  voice, a forfeiture for permanence. But compromise

  has brought him here. And softening. And permanence

  has poured its liquid bronze into the gap

  the temporary held so steadfastly. He steps away, steps

  back. What on earth to do? Encircle loss, finite

  and full-throated, as the stylus drops his highs and lows,

  his suns and heavens, his seamless climbs from heart to mist?

  Or forfeit loss and, so, be saved?

  Testament: Vermeer in December

  To my daughter, Elsbeth, two loaf-sized, secret coffers.

  To my sons, the pastel seascape.

  And the peat chest. And the Spanish chairs, perhaps.

  And the ivory-capped cane at rest on my bedstead.

  And the sheets, and the ear cushions,

  and the seventeen pocket handkerchiefs

  that flap at the summons of each dawn’s catarrh.

  Now and then, through their linen expanse

  I revisit my children, in flight down an iced stream,

  their sail-pushed sleds clicking, clicking

  like a covey of walnut carts… .

  To my servant, Bass Viol with Skull.

  The wicker cradle. The ash-gray travel mantle.

  To the men who will carry my coffin,

  glass flasks—six—and a marbled flute

  carved from the wing bone of a mute swan.

  Its music may offer a tremoloed solace

  as they lift from the gravesite my infant son.

  Two years in the earth, his wooden box, darkened

  by marl and a bleeding silt, will ride

  my greater other like a black topknot

  as we are lowered in tandem down the candlelit walls.

  To my wife, the yellow jacket, silk and fur-trimmed,

  that warms, through the mirror of a linseed wash,

  a hazel-haired woman eternally lit by a pearl necklace.

  She carries, with a dabble of madder and burnt ocher,

  the wistful, enigmatic gaze of my children

  as they circled the pale flute, dreaming they said of some

  haunted voice, deep in a gliding wing, its song

  both shrill and melodic,

  like the cry of an infant controlled by a choir.

  And to you, in half-rings around me, your faces

  spaced like pearls … imagine that moment

  when the ropes are lowered and something begins

  on the lit walls, shape over shape: I leave it to you,

  that shadowed conjunction of matter and light

  that flies, in its fashion, between us.

  The Magic Mountain

  To sit on a balcony, fattened by lap robes and a fur pouch,

  with the columbines nodding in their earthen pots

  and the weighted autumn moon

  already casting to the balustrade

  a rim of tepid frost, is to know to the bones

  the crepuscular slumber of bats—

  alit between seasons of dawn and day, day and dusk,

  and everything turning, perpetually… .

  This evening’s soup was studded with cloves—

  brown pods and corollas—the diminutive heads of

  sunflowers.

  To my left, in a neighboring balcony window,

  a young man is dying, face turned to the ceiling,

  his red chin beard sparse and pointed. He is joined

  by a woman with a parchment fan, although I see only

  her hand and cuff, the curve of a damask sleeve.

  And a sky of rootless willows, gray, yellow-green,

  pleated in parchment, swaying a little as the hand sways,

  folding at last to a single stem. And then a sleight

  of magic comes: from the fan’s handle

  a face is formed, spar by closing spar.

  Egyptian, I think. The hooded eyes. The slender beard.

  Each spar tucks down to its thin contribution,

  earlobe or cheekbone, a slice of brow—

  and there! one full-blown, ivory face, perfect

  on her damask knees.

  Now the bats are aloft, stroking in pairs past the pallid moon.

  Once, in the twilit dust of the X-ray room,

  I saw on the screen a human lung,

  abundant and veined as a willow.

  In his bed the young man is stirring, and the woman

  has lifted her parchment fan, the ivory face

  shining a moment in the facets of lamplight

  before its surrender to gray, yellow-green.

  And which is the better, I wonder:

  To gather from parts such a fullness?

  Or to part into fullness so breathtakingly?

  Pasteur on the Rue Vauquelin

  Near the red blade of a furred poinsettia,

  just to the left of the stamen cluster, a dragonfly slowly

  dips and lifts. In the grasp of its tendril legs

  floats a yellow almond, or a child’s thimble perhaps, or

  some bulbous facet of light. It is dawn. The boy,

  Joseph Meister, is sleeping, his necklace

  of cauterized dog bites

  glowing like topaz. In delirium,

  he mumbles of scarves and ale tents, how a jester

  thumbs back a tankard’s lid, and then—

  the snarl of a weasel in a woven cap.

  This is the grand hour, light coming toward me

  in fragments, as if to prepare me

  for its greater flood… .

  When I was a boy, floods toppled the fence posts

  and birches. And once,

 
; I watched at the depth of a shovel’s blade

  yellow turnips afloat in a tepid sea. Their rocking

  sent sets of concentric rings,

  and there—three Saturns just under my feet!

  Dawn. From my soft chair I am tempering rabies

  with injections of … rabies! And tracking

  the path of a yellow light, flower to memory to

  a mirror of sky. How it dips and lifts

  with its quick sting, synapse to synapse.

  How that which invades us, sustains us.

  The Highland

  Zelda Fitzgerald, 1939

  Dear One,

  Do you have the time? Can you take

  the time? Can you make

  the time?

  To visit me? The hospital doors have opened to spring,

  and its land is high, dear one, each slope

  with a vapor of crocuses. Its citizens, alas,

  are low. Despondent, in fact, though a jar of sun tea

  tans on the sill. The woman beside me

  has opened the gift of a china doll, an antique

  Frozen Charlotte. Glass face, a cap of china hair,

  shellacked to the sheen of a chestnut.

  At breakfast the shifting returned, dreadful

  within me: colors were infinite, part of the air …

  lines were free of the masses they held. The melon,

  a cloud; and the melon, an empty,

  oval lariat.

  They have moved the canvas chair

  from the window. Sun, enhanced

  by the brewing jar, threw

  an apricot scorch on the fabric. The fruit,

  a cloud. The fruit,

  a doll-sized, empty lariat.

  D. O., into what shape will our shapelessness flow?

  Dear One,

  Italian escapes me. Still, I float to the operas

  of Hasse and Handel, a word now and then

  lifting through … sole, libertà. In an earlier time,

  the thrum-plumped voice of a countertenor—half male,

  half female—might place him

  among us, we who are thickened

  by fracturings. D. O., now and then, my words

  break free of the masses they hold.

  Think of wind, how it barks through the reeds

  of a dog’s throat. How the pungent, meaty stream of it

  cracks into something like words—but not. I just sit

  in the sun room then, slumped in my fur and slabber,

  feeling the wolf begin, back away, then some

  great-jawed, prehistoric other

  begin, back away, then the gill-less,

  the gilled, then the first pulsed flecks

  begin, back away, until only a wind remains,

  vast and seamless. No earth, no heavens.

  No rise, no dip. No single flash of syllable

  that might be me. Or you.

  D. O.,

  Now a gauze of snow on the crocuses! I woke