Flight: New and Selected Poems

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,