by Linda Bierds
on the cobbles. And on the girls’ satin slippers
agerings of silt.
You have seen, secondhand, the centaurs.
I have seen the lobster redden,
then rise like a sun through the boiling water.
Immortality’s sign? you ask me. That slow-gaited sea change?
That languorous rising?
I have also seen a comet cross the sky.
Biography
To the dedicated listener, two sounds prevailed that night:
from rafters above the Grand Canal, pigeon snores,
and from the murky water, the tap of gondolas,
like empty walnut shells, against the water steps.
A January Wednesday, 1894, and through those
parenthetic sounds, a figure, Constance Woolson—
novelist, great friend to Henry James—leapt
to her death.
She fell.
Depressed—delirious, demented—she died of—influenza—
loving him. Of unrequited love for James? There is no
evidence. Seven years before that night, mid-April
through late May, they shared a home in Bellosguardo.
A villa. Voluminous. Then met in Geneva, secretly.
Secretly? Perhaps, although discretion ruled, not
impropriety.
No impropriety? Agreed, although
what ruled was vanity, his need for her devotion.
A spinster, deaf—in just one ear—and elderly—a mere
three years his senior—she was for him primarily a …
source—think Alice, Tita, Cornelia, May—
yes, a loyal friend, of course, but …
Knowing
her death was suicide, James “utterly collapsed.”
He could not know, although he suffered, yes. And moved
into her empty rooms, into her empty beds, in Venice, then
in Oxford. He sought her ghost—as you do now.
She took herself away—There is no evidence—
away from his possession,
he who so valued possession.
What is biography? What did he mourn? Analysis?
Appropriation? She slipped away, as he has slipped
from you. Anecdote and intuition? Some weeks beyond
her death, by gondola, James ferried her dresses
to the wide lagoon and, one by one—Reverence?
Devotion?—
lowered them into the water.
They floated back, and back, he said—Hearsay?
Secondhand remembrance?—like ghastly, black
balloons, empty and full simultaneously;
although, through salt, silt, and the turning years,
their tidal scrape against the weave—
Reciprocal immortality?—there is no evidence.
From Campalto
We entered Venice by Casa degli Spiriti.
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
Imagine a white horse, alone in a watery meadow.
Or, alone in a watery meadow, imagine
a white horse. The latter increases your need for me,
your relief in my company, as we walk together
down the story’s thin lanes, circling the meadow
and lolling horse, and the gondoliers on the landing
bicker and smoke and shuffle their soft-backed cards.
We have, you as my character and I as your guide,
crossed from Venice on the wide lagoon—
rib-cage deep but for trenches the ships slip through—
and we look toward it now, as one by one
its spires sink through a white fog, that, like your need,
advances.
To keep me beside you, you speak
of da Vinci’s menagerie and the grape skins
best suited for grappa. You would question my friendship
with Henry James—you had hoped, in fact,
for Henry James—but I have grown singular here,
essential to you as our gondoliers, although
they’ve turned silent, fog-erased, and beacon us closer
by nothing but pipe smoke and their cards’ arrhythmic
purr. You would ask of his manner, his temperament,
the nature of our fidelity—two writers enamored
with fiction’s grip—of my life in his presence,
of my life in his shadow,
but are grateful instead
to watch as I pock our trench with pilings
and we feel our way back through the pale lagoon,
column by column, much as the blind
might track the cairns on an ancient path.
You are frightened, I know, in those intervals
when our hands break free and we float
into nothingness. And, yes, I have kept this from you:
increasingly, as the page fills, I am the fabric
of nothingness. You would ask of his voice
and fashion, the nature of our fidelity,
but out from the white fog, here is Casa degli Spiriti,
where up you swing from the swaying boat
and that which remains absorbs me.
Accountancy: Dürer in Antwerp
This many times have I dined with the Factor ///////,
thus often with Stecher , thus with my Lords /////.
(I am drawn to the fishes. And to citrons—sugared,
like frost over gem stones.)
In trade for my portraits, I have taken
a branch of white coral, a cedarwood rosary, an ounce
of good ultramarine. And a great fish scale
that gauzes the day through its intricate lens.
This many times have mummers amused me ////.
Fourteen stuivers, to date, for raisins. Two for a brush.
One for a buffalo horn. Twenty florins in all
for firewood, flax, one elk’s hoof, one parrot cage.
In December, four florins—gold—for a little baboon
who nods like Erasmus when darkness descends.
There is solace, I find, in accountancy,
the prudent, resonant thrift of an evening’s meal
preserved in a slant mark, like the solace I feel
with needle and ink, Time’s cantering beast
furred for eternity by a burin’s bite.
To Johann, one Passion. To the surgeon
and house servant, each, a Life of Our Lady.
To Konrad, in service of the Emperor’s daughter,
one Melancholy, three Marys, a Eustace, a Nemesis,
a Jerome in His Cell. (Arranged on a wall,
these gifts might mirror our human progression,
as the Great Procession of Our Lady’s Assumption—/—
mirrored our ranks, butcher to saint.)
This many times has a fever consumed me /////.
I have dined again // with my Lords.
At the Feast of Our Lady’s Assumption, just after
Craftsmen in the Great Procession, but before Prophets
and an armored Saint George, came a crowd of widows
garbed in white linen, accounting for losses amongst us.
Silent, in step, they seemed not shape but vacancy,
alit between mason and seamstress, foot soldier and clerk.
They seemed the space an etch mark frees,
the empty trough that shape awaits.
Grand day, carmine and boot-black and the swirling
world. And those stately widows
defining our borders? These times
did their passing enfold me ///////////////////////////////.
Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice
after the painting by Pietro Longhi, c. 1751
To the tumbler settling on the sawdust street,
with its flames and hoops and carnival swords
swirling up like an alchemist’s galaxy, this quiet scene,
glimpsed throu
gh a stable’s open doors, seems at first
a pond—wall-locked, opaque, lit from above
by the upreaching arc of a white swan.
Then his eyes adjust and the pond is a dampened
stable floor, one ruffle of black rhinoceros. And who
would step forth to restrain him,
if he slipped on his hands and tumbler’s knees
in through that black expanse? Or rolled
in a patchwork somersault
like a moon in its blue orbit, while
the swan slowly shifted from beak and wing
to a gaggle of white-masked spectators, mute in the muted
light? Who would object if he nestled beside
that nobility, that count, that willowy, pale contessa
whose throat and white breast
first gave to his eyes a swan’s neck? From her perch
near a waist-high wall, she is watching
a black-cloaked domino, the dip of his tricornered hat
as he bends to the still rhinoceros,
the wall a border he leans across. And who
would not quicken, as the tumbler does
in his froth of sawdust and shadow, when
the beast slowly raises its earthen mass,
its dusty, furrowed, thick-skinned snout, where
a flag of summer wheat dangles? Just over
its plated hull, just over its rheumy, upturned eyes,
the eyes of the domino hover, dim, plated
in silk, pale as hoops
afloat in some future’s flat-lit sky.
Dominance? Challenge? A courtship display?
Who would not wonder what the animal sees
in the white-masked face of such
facelessness, as its toes slowly spread
on the dampened floor, and a shiver of wheat
rises and falls with its breathing?
Details Depicted: Insect and Hair
In the margin between No reason exists
and the innocency of my actings
in midst of the late revolutions, the writer has circled
a single fly wing, caught years before on the damp page,
now dried to a gauze. Two hundred words
beyond its brittle veins, he falters
and, sensing no stay of his execution, revisits
the world, the stars over this terraqueous globe
and the hazel wheat. Then he rallies.
A peculiar magnificence has filled his cell:
sunset squared through fist-sized windows
and more—there, fast in the page, an arc of amber
beard hair, cupped like calipers toward his drying m.
And as he writes mistaken me for another
and the scored light fades, he wishes the wing
had followed the hair, as transcendence follows
the life well lived. He wishes the order reversed—
that, first, lit by the hair’s prophetic glint,
he might open his story—Born of worthy parents—
then weave his history forward, as the paper itself
wove history forward: flax to fabric to shirt
(pockets emptied, buttons snipped) to boiler to pulp
to lifted chin. He knows the power
of augury, of the signs in a perfect path.
He knows, were the wing pinned
near the page’s end, he might close
with the grand intangibles, the diaphanous strivings
of citizenship—allegiance, benevolence,
the peace and protection of a government—and earn,
by his words, his flight.
Late day,
on the wind, two bells ringing in tandem. No help
at all, the artifacts, his useless plea
cresting on the sloughed. What good
to end with the body—wrought—
the upward arc reversed? As useless now
to elevate his humanness as to watch
the weightless page withdraw, regain its rags,
its sacking, rope, its bits of salted fishing net.
What good to open with allegiance and then
move downward to the flax? What good
to start with government, then close
with crows against the sky, or the backward-swirling, forward-rolling carriage wheels
light on the evening’s earth?
Acqua Alta
Vandalism drew us nearer, a slim, graffitied slash
from Icaro to Dedalo across their marble bodies.
In the piazza below our museum window,
carabinieri in sky-blue shirts, and pigeons
and flotsam and teenage boys, drifted together
in the late-day sun—but no,
it wasn’t ink-rich aerosol, that looping gash,
just the sculptor’s woven cord,
Dedalo to Icaro, lovely in its making. Our spirits
lifted, while over San Marco’s quay
the sea quickly rose, glazing the piazza’s indentations.
He is tying the wings, someone said, half in pity,
half derision, the myth roped down too literally,
the father too cunning, the son too enraptured.
In from the basin, the sea quickly cast
its daily mass, herringbone brick by brick. A shallow,
dogleg bay, lovely in its making.
He is tying—then the pigeons lifted, and the boys
could not contain themselves
and broke through the glaze in their soft shoes,
churning the water—the wings—deafened
by joy and transformation. One, then a dozen,
so suddenly the carabinieri on the dryer reaches
cinched closer together, the moment
half folly, half threat, the Basilica they guarded,
the enamels and marble emperors, the massive,
star-strewn ticking clock, half solid, half,
in reflection, shattered. One, then a dozen,
so suddenly the carabinieri … half solid,
half shattered … cinched closer, the moment.
He is tying the wings, someone said. In pity. Derision.
It breaks the heart such recklessness.
Salvage
What was the sound, a rasp?
No, not a rasp. A rattle, then? No, not that.
And twice it passed over you? I sat
at the waist-gunner window. Night—
and the wingtip’s flashing light
bit through slanted snow: green, green.
Then we struck the mountain. And of eight,
five were thrown free and survived?
I was cast into deep snow
and plane-shaped debris slipped over me.
Its sound a scraping? No,
not a scraping. It slipped down the canyon wall
and I followed its snow-trough, then
guided the others to me
with blasts from my Mae West whistle.
Yours was a rescue mission, far from war?
I was alone and just overhead in the darkness
snow geese and trumpeter swans passed.
And the green light flashed?
I could hear their bodies working—And you sat
at the waist?—ligament, ligature, the labor
of leaving. In unison, then? A thrum? No,
each sound in its slender chamber. And you
whistled them down to you? Yes.
From the Sea of Tranquillity
Item: After the hopping and gathering,
in that flat, crepuscular light, Armstrong
stroked to the moon’s crisp dust, it is said,
Albrecht Dürer’s initials, first the A’s wide table,
then beneath it, the slumped, dependable D,
the image sinking slowly through that waterless sea,
named less for tides than resemblances.
Item: In the year 1471, in the sixth hour
/>
of Saint Prudentius’ Day, Albrecht Dürer was born,
the moon afloat in Gemini’s house, and far to the east
Leo rising; an alliance that promised, with travel
and wealth, a slender physique—so slender, in fact,
Dürer slipped from it daily, as, gripped by concentration,
someone else’s Albrecht drew a stylus down the grain.
Item: Kicked up through the moon’s pale dust, a boot
creates not a scattering but a wave, particles joined
in a singular motion, faithful to the shape
of displacement. Such is the loss of atmosphere,
although aura remains, and time. Think of two men,
each at his milky page, thirst and the dipper
a moment away, and the whole unbroken before them.
Flight
Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic—
back from bone the echoes stroke, back
from the halved heart, the lungs
three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills.
From a leather chaise, the astronaut’s withered legs
dangle, as back they come, sounds
a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape.
The physician cocks his head and taps—exactly
as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock
chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved
and halved, until a roof appears, black as space.
I’m gaining ground, he says, the astronaut,
who knows, from space, earth is just a blue-green glow,
a pilot light he circled once, lifted, swiftly flown
above the rafters and atmospheres, half himself
and half again some metamorphic click,
extinct as memory. I’m gaining ground,
he says, and back it comes, his glint
of cloud-crossed world: a pilot light
or swaddled leaf, green in the season’s infancy.
