by Linda Bierds
stringers of air replaced stringers of ore,
and mystery began, as it always does—tommy-knockers
and candle auguries—they untrussed the truss,
refolded the blindfold, watched as he kicked three times
then stilled,
as filled with unknowing as they once were,
fresh from the lift.
Long before
a flagpole’s weightless nib pierced the lunar dust
and pumice shattered, and rovers flexed
their divining rods, the miners approached
the gaunted horse, their hair green-tinted
from copper seep,
their jumper coats scummed
from some synthesis of world and rain.
Bedrock. Primer. Seedling. Canopy … Where to begin,
they wondered, then began as they always do,
as they touched, then lowered, the long head,
first to the water, then to the grain.
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.
1918 Huber Light Four
To say that it glowed,
the tractor’s half-scale replica,
its twenty polished woods seamless and separate
as a tract of furrows filled with rain,
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is to offer the finish before the start,
the worm before the jig. Yet to say late sun,
cast through the fair’s barn-turned-exhibition-hall,
burnished it, as it burnished
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the jars of yellow beets, shifts agency
to a higher power. Three years, the woodworker said,
two thousand hours drawing walnut’s brindled light,
and whatever light the willow offered,
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the cedar and birch, the African mahogany.
Almost alchemy, how sanding transformed
wood to grain. Almost chemistry: friction, air,
vapors beneath the polish cloth—almost
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complete combustion, the perfect half-scale whole of it
clean as the flames some candles offer. Though to say
that it drew from its absent shape,
as candles do, suggests a labor less touched
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by time, or a time less touched by absence.
Hour by hour, something like harmony
passed through the room, while something like melanin
rose in the model’s polished wood,
•
in the Kalif dahlias and sawdust floor, then darkened
a tabletop tapestry, the spokes of grain and braided vines
arranged like a living wagon wheel,
and darkened the wheel hub’s gathered quince
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and a slender ripple of cornsilk wind—
illusion’s ancient artifact:
thin strands stretching out from a back-cast rim
to show that a stillness was turning.
PART TWO
Roget’s Illusion: Two
Before Confinement and Preservation,
in the columns beside cart wheel and gear,
he has written compass … windlass … hinge—
all above Evolution but below Elevation.
•
And in columns beyond cart wheel and gear,
a thousand synonyms bleat, as his weary mind,
above revolution but below revelation,
wishes the project penned. Even cribbed. Bound
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for a thousand weary minds. The metonyms bleat
for the animal world, just outside his window,
cribbed, penned, bound, projected into wisdoms
the stars align across. He stops, watches two moths,
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just outside the window, whirl toward his lamp’s minimal
light. Why try again to capture Matter or Symmetry,
when the line he watches from stars to lamp stops
in a moth-shaped cipher of dust?
•
Lamp. Matter. Symmetry. Why try again to capture
the world? Light as compass, wind as hinge?
All the dust-shaped moths on their word-shaped pins,
after Confinement and before Preservation?
The Evening Star
Full night not yet on the Sound
and far to the west, one brilliant, snow-filled mountain
flares over the water toward me, its quick afterimage
fluttering behind, part peak, part half-transparent moth
skimming the table
and reference books,
stitching together the weathered lines
where Dürer sketches Adam’s ash tree, and Kepler
watches a dead star’s light, and someone
named Smeaton—John—hauls a tallow-fed chandelier
up the lighthouse steps near Plymouth.
•
Plump, short-winged, retinal burn, pulsing
over the flat-lined past, reviving
the burins and waxy Edens, the breezes and tides,
the twenty-four half-pound chandelier candles
slowly slipping their lighthouse beam
down another century’s hazards.
And then it’s gone,
quick sprinkle of ash dusting a membrane’s rods and cones.
Everything still, again. The sun just down, the past
just words, and the first starlight so pale
on the dusk, I must turn to catch it peripherally.
Thoughts Toward the First Christmas Lecture
• MICHAEL FARADAY, 1860
A skin of ice on the inner panes
and Faraday there at the window, his candle flame
burning a peephole. Already morning has warmed
the eaves, the hedgerows thickened by snow.
Children, he thinks, penless, his words underscored
by a tendril of smoke, I speak to you as a child myself,
amazed by the candle’s phenomena: wax and light
and uplifting air, the little cup they form together,
the shallow pool that shivers there. Over
an empty hummock, parallel tracks of a sleigh soften,
and between the tracks, a horse’s widening hoofprints.
Something has scurried across that journey—marten
or hare—bisecting the sleigh tracks. Consider
that grand circularity, light to fuel to light.
And mystery: a flame that never bites the host
but fattens from it nonetheless. Perhaps there were
two horses, stepping in tandem down the hummock,
one set of hoofprints absorbing the other. Children,
we are drawn here to be philosophers, to ask always,
What is the cause? And so you question,
How d
o flame and fuel meet? And so I say,
By mutual attraction. By the bonding of things
undissolved in each other. Unlikely, of course, still
were their gaits equal and the reins crossed
their shoulders simultaneously… . Let us turn
to an illustration. Tip your towel to a basin of water,
or better—better!—trouble your mother for a fresh prawn,
then place it tail first in a tumbler, plump head
cupped over the rim. Children, water will climb
through the creature—as fuel climbs a wick!—
by mutual attraction. Already morning
has warmed the eaves, the icicles transparent now,
sloughing their waxy frost—and soon to be prisms,
blinding, as the sun arcs into view. And what of the flame,
you ask me, its shadow so solid on the classroom wall?
How can it be both substance and light? Perhaps
there were two horses, stepping in tandem
down the white expanse—soon to be blinding …
Children, I must leave you for now with this:
Never is flame of a single body, but a multitude of
successions, so rapid the eye unites them as one.
Something has scurried across the sleigh tracks—
marten or hare—its jittery flight bisecting the hummock,
this way—or that—its slim path both absence and shape,
a low-slung whip of smoke.
Navigation
Waves or Moths or whatever it is to be called.
• VIRGINIA WOOLF
If it is to be The Waves, then
the moon, perhaps, weighting a sextant’s upper shelf,
with the sea a shelf below some traveler’s feet.
Planets, time, position line, position line—
and the place is fixed. Invisibly.
•
If it is to be The Moths, then
something about their flight. April, perhaps.
In a window, the night-blooming horn
of a gramophone. And over the fields,
moths flying, holding their brief shapes
in constant angle to a planet’s light.
•
If it is to be The Waves—the sextant and salt—
then nothing to see at first but stars
and indices. Not the wake’s pale seam.
Not a fin or foremast. Not even
the daylit band of the past,
just under the earth’s horizon.
•
Not yet, at least. No story. (A lamp, perhaps,
a flowerpot.) No past with its child
stopped by a lake in her stiff shoes, toeing
the placid water. Arm’s length before her,
in an arc, dollops of bread bob—and beyond
the bread, in a second arc, a dozen,
hand-sized turtles, treading in place.
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They cannot eat, the moths. (A little nectar,
a little sap.) Mandibles gone. Just a slender,
tubal tongue wound like a watch spring
in their hollow throats. And, afraid, the turtles
will not eat, the shadow of the backlit child
rippling toward them as, one by one,
new dollops of bread drop.
•
If it is to be The Waves, then
cycles on cycles. Eternity. Plurality. (Even the rogue
absorbed.) If it is to be The Moths, then
singleness and brevity. Great brevity—although,
in the leaves behind the child, they are just
beginning to stir, the day’s late light
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caught in the orbs of the early lamps.
And what is that feeling, shaking its wings
within her? Late day, the leaves and bread
and urgency, all the curious curved shapes
treading in place. If she took a step backward,
would they, in an arc, draw nearer, as a ring
might follow its planet? What then
would she make of the world?
Correlation of the Physical Forces
• MICHAEL FARADAY
Watched, as a child, the clockmaker, the glint
of his iris deep in the eyepiece, like mica in a well.
•
Watched iron filings bristle a magnet.
•
In his father’s shop, watched an axle’s tip sag over an anvil.
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Loved the Fens.
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Loved Virgil’s words on young vines, their trellis
of elms in the nursery field.
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Considered life as a clockmaker.
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Considered life as a blacksmith.
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Loved, on his mother’s table, the candle-powered carousel,
how the colts floated up on their tiny fobs as the heat rose.
•
Wrote with pencil in a leather-bound notebook:
“Soap bubbles.” “Balloon.”
•
Wrote: “Refer to the last lecture.”
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Wrote: “Respiration and its analogy
to the burning of a candle.”
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Considered Virgil’s vines, transplanted.
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Considered the empty elms, each knife-notched
to show where the vines once faced.
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Inducted electrical currents. (Seven halfpence, seven
rounds of zinc, six paper discs moistened by salted water.)
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Refuted, through science, séance table-turning.
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Saw, through Virgil, notched elms as the map
for a parallel planting.
•
Understood, as a child, the hiss of a candle’s wick.
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Understood the clockmaker’s words: verge, escapement.
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Loved electromagnetism, “The constant circling of a wire
round a magnet and a magnet round a wire.”
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Loved the lack of escapement there, each
neither dragging the other nor leaving it behind.
•
Saw, through Virgil, notched elms as the tracks
of a cogged wheel.
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Saw, through time, “The idea of them as they dwell in matter.”
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Wrote in a blue-green notebook: “Carbon.” “Cathode.”
“Cannot.” “Cannot.” “However exalted they may be.”
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Wrote: “We shall today.” “For a little while.”
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Wrote: “Correlation of the physical forces.”
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
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swirling up like an alchemist’s galaxy, this quiet scene,
glimpsed through a stable’s open doors, seems at first
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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
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would step forth to restrain him,
if he slipped on his hands and tumbler’s knees
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in through that black expanse? Or rolled
in a patchwork somersault
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like a moon in its blue orbit, while
the swan slowly shifted from beak and wing
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to a gaggle of white-masked spectators, mute in the muted
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that nobility, that count, that willowy, pale contessa
whose throat and white breast
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first gave to his eyes a swan’s neck? From her perch
near a waist-high wall, she is watching
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a black-cloaked domino, the dip of his tricornered hat
as he bends to the still rhinoceros,
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the wall a border he leans across. And who
would not quicken, as the tumbler does
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in his froth of sawdust and shadow, when
the beast slowly raises its earthen mass,
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its dusty, furrowed, thick-skinned snout, where
a flag of summer wheat dangles? Just over
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its plated hull, just over its rheumy, upturned eyes,
the eyes of the domino hover, dim, plated
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in silk, pale as hoops
afloat in some future’s flat-lit sky.
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Dominance? Challenge? A courtship display?
Who would not wonder what the animal sees
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in the white-masked face of such
facelessness, as its toes slowly spread
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on the dampened floor, and a shiver of wheat
rises and falls with its breathing?
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.)
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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.
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This many times have mummers amused me ////.
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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
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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
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with needle and ink, Time’s cantering beast
furred for eternity by a burin’s bite.
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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,
