by Linda Bierds
to its first brilliance—midnight, great moon—
and walked through the hallways. The pin-shaped leaves
of the potted cosmos threw a netted shadow,
and I stopped in its fragile harmony,
my arms, bare feet, the folds of my limp gown
striped by such weightless symmetry
I might have been
myself again. Through an open screen door
I saw a patient, drawn out by the brightness perhaps,
her naked body a ghastly white, her face
a ghastly, frozen white, fixed
in a bow-mouthed syncope, like something
out of time. As we are, D. O., here
in the Highland, time’s infinite, cyclic now-and-then
one simple flake of consciousness
against the heated tongue.
Dear One,
My Italian improves:
sole, libertà,
and Dio, of course, D. O.! (Although He
has forsaken me.) The tea at the window
gleams like the flank of a chestnut horse. It darkens
imperceptibly, as madness does, or dusk.
All morning, I held a length of cotton twine—
a shaggy, oakum filament—
between the jar and brewing sun.
We made a budding universe: the solar disc,
the glassy globe of reddish sea, the stillness
in the firmament. At last across the cotton twine
a smoke began, a little ashless burn, Dio,
that flared and died so suddenly
its light has yet to reach me.
Concentration
We understand the egg-sized ship,
the thread-and-spindle masts, the parchment sails
puffed to a rigid billow.
And the lightbulb that enfolds it.
We understand the man, Graham Leach, his passion for
impossibles. We see him,
tucked within the vapor of his jasmine tea,
while heron-toed forceps slowly wed
a deckhand to a tear of glue.
The rudder would lodge in the bulb’s slim throat
but could be folded, slipped inside, reopened
into seamlessness. We understand that sleight of hand
but not this full-sized pocket watch
upright in a 30-watt. Perhaps it’s made of lesser stuff
than gold, some nonmetallic pliancy. Still,
it mirrors the museum shelf, and to the left
the plump barque, static in its perfect globe.
Perhaps he blew a gaping bulb
then tucked the watch inside, rewarmed the glass,
drew out a path, clamped one end’s concentric rings,
the contact point’s dark star. This would explain
what we’ve attributed to time
and now must give to fire: the amber face,
the wrinkled Roman numerals—
still fixed, still spaced to mark the intervals
of space, but rippled,
a dozen, ashless filaments. The filament
itself is gone. Gold’s light enough, perhaps.
We understand, to make a living bulb,
three hundred wicks were tried. Before a match was found.
Oakum, fishline, flax, plumbago. A coconut’s
starched hair. A sprig of human beard.
Three hundred tries, before some agent, tucked
within a vacuum globe, could catch the rasp
outside—that friction-fed, pervasive tick—
and channel it, and draw it in.
Orbit
For warmth in that Swedish winter, the child,
aged one, wore petticoats hooked from angora,
knotted and looped to a star-shaped weave.
And for her father, there at the well lip,
she did seem to float in the first magnitude—
alive and upright, far down the cylindric dark,
with the star of her petticoats
buoyantly rayed on the black water.
One foot in the water bucket, one foot
glissading a brickwork of algae, he stair-stepped
down, calling a bit to her ceaseless cries, while
his weight, for neighbors working the tandem crank,
appeared, disappeared, like a pulse.
In bottom silt, the mottled snails
pulled back in their casings
as her brown-shoed legs lifted, the image
for them ancient, limed with departure:
just a shimmer of tentacles
as the skirt of a mantle collapsed
and a shape thrust off toward answering shapes,
there, and then not, above.
Latitude
With a framework of charts and reckonings, reason tells us
they died from time, the rhythmic tick of hub and blade
that, turning, turned their fuel to mist.
And reason says, while Earhart held the plane
balanced as a juggler’s plate, Noonan tipped the octant
toward the stars, and then, no radios
to guide them, toward the dawn and rising sun.
On the hot, New Guinea runway, they’d lifted glasses,
a scorch of mango juice brilliant in their hands.
Around their heels, a dog-sized palm leaf fretted,
then the cockpit’s humid air slowly chilled to atmosphere
and there was nothing: two thousand miles
of open sea, theory, friction, velocity. The weighted ifs,
the hair-thin, calibrated whens. Reason says they died
from time and deviation. That vision can’t be trusted:
the octant’s sightline, quivered by an eyelash,
the compass needle, vised by dust, sunlight’s runway
on the water, even the slack-weave net of longitude
cast to gather time and space, a few salt stars,
the mackerel sky. The folly of its dateline
throws travelers into yesterday, and so the snub-nose plane
quickly crossed into the past, and stalled, and sank,
the theories say, one hour before departure.
Reason asks for grace with time, a little latitude
that lets a dateline shiver at the intervals of loss
and gain. As vision does, within
those intervals—and though it can’t be trusted, still
it circles back, time and time again:
the black Pacific closing over them. And then,
the click of glasses, orange and radiant.
Grand Forks: 1997
An arc of pips across a playboard’s field
tightens, then, in the Chinese game of Go,
curls back to weave a noose, a circle closing, closed.
Surrounded, one surrenders. Blindsided,
collared from behind. Then silence, or so
my friends revealed, the arc across their patchwork fields
not pips, but flood. The dikes collapsed, they said;
the river, daily, swelled. Then pastures rose,
as earth’s dark water table—brimful—spilled, and closed
behind their backs, the chaff-filled water red
with silt, with coulees, creeks, a russet snow,
all merging from behind. Then through the bay-bright fields
a dorsal silence came. And, turning, filled
the sunken streets, the fallen dikes, the slow,
ice-gripped periphery where frozen cattle closed
across their frozen likenesses. Mirrored,
as when the Northern Lights began, their glow
was mirrored, green to green, across the flooded fields—
like haunted arcs of spring, one circle closing, closed.
The Circus Riders
Marc Chagall, 1969
Sly-eyed and weightless, my violet rooster
quietly crosses a tent’s blue dome.
He is buoyant, inverted, a migrating, wattled chandelier
that blinks from a ceiling’s cool expanse
as the astronauts do—now one, now two, now three—
in orbit past a camera lens. While I dapple his beak
with a palette knife—and the acrobat’s tights,
and the gallery’s blue curve—the astronauts
crackle from space, their silver suits
shining like herring brine. They tell me the stars,
ungrated by atmosphere, do not twinkle at all, but
glow in their slow orbs, like shells on a black beach.
Now and then, through a tiny, waste-water door,
a galaxy of urine rolls, each oval drop bloated,
indistinguishable, they say, from the stars.
And the sextant quivers through this human heaven!
On a sky of henna and cypress green,
a purple moon lingers. I placed to its left
a grandfather clock, massive, floating up
from a village’s peaked roofs, then tilting to gravity’s arc.
With its walls and weightless precision, my clock
■ ■ ■
seems a spacecraft’s twin, a few seconds—
lacquered to history—pressed to the crystal
like faces. When I was ten, the Russian woods held a haze
of white birches. Specters, I thought, that sidestroked
at night past my open window, their leafy hoods
rattling. And now they are back,
waving from space, humming Dvořák’s minor keys—
the plaintive A’s, the pensive E’s—their world
a little bead of sound
in that vast, unbroken soundlessness. A little
glint, and rhythmic tick.
No chemist, Delacroix!
His paints will not dry.
Over time, the horse heads would sag into roan melons,
the portraits scowl, the lions relax their clenched jaws,
were they not, on alternate years, hung upside down
on their brass hooks—walls of inverted Delacroixs
regaining their borders, seeping back into neck scarves
and bridles, as my specters seeped back into
birch leaves. On those lessening nights, I watched
my father, asleep in his slim bed. His shoulders
and chest. Now and then, the glisten of herring scales
at his wrists. Head back, his full beard pointed toward
Mars, he seemed balanced there between death
and exertion, while the tannery’s smells—sharp
as the odors of art—swept over us, and its
paddocked cattle, in the frail balance
of their own hours, shifted and lowed.
So this was the body
emptied. Exhausted. I stood between
terror and splendor as time and what must be
the soul—as the day and the day’s morning—
seeped back to him.
And so they are circling back, the riders,
a talc of pumice on their boot soles.
When it all began, they said, and gravity
first dropped its grip, an effluvium of parts
flew up, hidden from brooms and the vacuum:
a curl of ash, a comb’s black tooth, one slender
strip of cellophane, and what must have stung
those steady hearts: a single, silver screw—
now vertical, now cocked, now looping slowly
past each troubled face… . But nothing failed,
and so they’ve turned, the fire of their engines
a violet-feathered plume. My acrobat kicks up
one weightless leg. And holds. Across the room
a green tea brews. Their pulses
must have lurched, then stalled—the screw, the soft,
undissipated curl of ash: their craft
was crafted, and, crafted, flawed!
I see them in their silver suits, stunned
to numbness, as, looping slowly by, two sets
of pale, concentric rings fused nothing
more than air and human quickening.
An eye-blink’s time, perhaps, before they felt
themselves return: that wash of rhythmic strokes,
that hum.
But that was their
moment, their wonder.
I tremble before my own heart.
FROM First Hand (2005)
Prologue
They darken. In the sky over Florence,
the oblong clouds swell and darken.
And hailstones lift back through the updrafts,
thickening, darkening, until, swollen as bird eggs,
they drop to the cobbled streets.
Horses! the child Galileo thinks, then
peeks through the doorway
to the shock of ten thousand icy hooves.
At his back, his father is tuning violins,
and because there is nothing sharper at hand
Galileo saws through a captured hailstone
with a length of Estring,
the white globe opening slowly, and the pattern inside
already bleeding its frail borders.
Layers and layers of ice—
Like what? Onion pulp? Cypress rings?
If only the room were colder, and the eye
finer. If only the hand were faster,
and the blade sharper, and firmer,
and without a hint of song …
Time and Space
Deep space. The oblong, twinkle-less stars
matte as wax pears. And the astronauts are losing heart,
the heady lisp of auricle and ventricle
fading to a whisper, as muscles shrink to infants’ hearts,
or the plum-shaped nubs of swans.
Atrophy, from time in space, even as the space in time
contracts. And how much safer it was—
ascension—at some earlier contraction, each flyer intact,
cupped by a room-sized celestial globe
staked to a palace lawn. How much easier, to duck
with the doublets and powdered wigs
through the flap of a trapdoor and watch on a soot-stained
copper sky the painted constellations, or,
dead-center, a fist of shadowed earth dangling from a ribbon.
All systems go, of course: each moist,
diminishing heart, just sufficient at its terminus to fuel
the arm, the opening hand, to coax
to the lips a fig or pleated straw. Still, how much easier
to drift in a hollow globe, its perpetual,
tallow-lit night, while outside with the mazes and spaniels
the day, like an onion, arced up in layers
to the dark heavens. How much safer to enter a time, a space,
when a swan might lift from a palace pond
to cross for an instant—above, below—its outstretched
Cygnus shape, just a membrane
and membrane away. A space in time when such accident
was prophecy, and such singular alignment—
carbon, shadow, membrane, flight—sufficient for the moment.
Counting: Gregor Mendel in the Prelacy
My companions since childhood, these numbers.
My constant counterparts, as lime kilns
steamed on our green hills
and my father grafted to russet knuckles
a golden apple’s fingerlings. (That first stalk
six posts from the gate, and the gate
twelve strides from the pond.)
Each winter, I loved the ermine’s harmony,
how it stitched over fresh drifts
the parallel pricks of its tracks. And the pale,
symmetrical petals of snow, how they covered
our seventy houses, our eight hundred
yoke of good arable, good meadowla
nd,
our four hundred ninety souls.
Holy Father, do not think that I think of you less
when I think of you mathematically.
Tomorrow, November closes—
and, polished by frost, the church bells
respond with a clarity. Already,
one-fourth of the compost
is eaten by lime, one-third of the belfry
by shadow. How the second hand ticks!
Stay with me, now, as I wind through my first life… .
Thinking of Red
Marie Curie, 1934
Back from the workbench and lamp, the tilt
of the microscope’s mantis head, back from the droplet
of sea, salted by powdered radium,
and the lift and swirl of its atoms—the buffed,
invisible globes of its atoms—she sat
with her apple and knife, confined to her wide bed.
I am thinking of red, she said. And those
primary years, gathered like cardinals.
Although there were no cardinals, of course.
But gooseberries. And roe, there was roe
so gold it was red. All the fruit trees were padded
with cabbage leaves, and she climbed, red in her pinafore,
through their crackling branches. Now and then,
from the movements of children above her,
dry cabbage leaves rained a brittle parchment.
And then, just silence, as they sat with their meals
of bread and gooseberries—like mythic birds
in their bright aprons—while the Polish sun,
for miles to the west, cast to their pale,
partitioned land the fractured shadows of fruit trees.
Thinking of red … corpuscles, their freight of typhus,
their glowing freight of radium. But—no—today
just the red of those childhood years. Roe.
And apples, how the ships slipped down from Kasmierz,
laden with apples. Thin ships, so weighted they seemed
just prow, great horses legging the yellow river.
On deck, she would watch the straw raked back,
as the scent of a thousand russet apples—
nested like cardinals—rose in the winter air.
She could toss to the river the blemished ones—
the captain gave permission—then cover her basket
with perfect others, the red, chilled, perfect
globes, so cold they would fill the season.
But even the blemished lingered awhile,
lifted and dove through the clear air, and sent
to the prows and empty docks, to the winter rafts
and long horizon, their sets of concentric rings.
Before they sank through the closing water,
they lifted and turned as … atoms must. Or better,
cardinals. Although there were no cardinals,
