by Linda Bierds
•
Four months. Clewed, hove to.
Then islands and islands at the New World’s rim.
What else can I tell you?
Shipwreck. Rocks on the boot soles. Down the beach,
•
one arctic fox, fearless, barked.
••••••••••••
Presence? Parallel. A thereafter sensed. We, though …
••••••••••••
Then more, barking, white in their winter fur,
slinking in toward our fires like ground fog.
They had no history with us, and hence
no fear of us, we with so little but history.
•
We shot them. They came. We shot. They came.
When winter blew through our crude huts,
we caulked the sticks with their bodies.
When blizzards drove us deep in their caves,
•
they climbed into crevices over our heads, shifting
all night like a wind-rippled canopy—
or wide-winged, otherworldly bird
that would not fly from us.
••••••••••••
When we shall lay to … you shall lay to …
When we after drifting … you after drifting …
When we shall lower … you shall lower …
••••••••••••
To lay, drifting lower. After drifting
to rise … As, God willing, they do, sounding their way
down these shallow coasts, echo by echo.
•
Scurvy and winter lessened us, already
halved on the sixteenth day—
not from ourselves, exactly, or from others,
but from the outcome of self and other,
the crafted, patterned offerings
that, over water, met us halfway.
•
What else can I tell you, there in your morning
or nightfall, knowing already
of voyages, violence, hardship, grace? What else
can I write, alive and whole and world-full,
yet fractured as these notes to you?
•
From the body of our ship, collapsed on the shore,
we built a ship, from the shattered shape
a smaller shape, a single-masted oval cask
which, over time, delivered us.
••••••••••••
Two lanterns, that we might receive you …
Six guns, that we might avoid you …
One flag—blue—that we might know you
after long absence …
••••••••••••
They seem nothing but steam now, the foxes.
The sudden, unbidden breath over glass
that blinds us shapelessly.
•
What most endures with me—
a multivoiced jay—will, you say,
carry what most remains of me. My name
and the bird stitched back to back, balanced
•
as reflection. S-t-e-l-l-e-r-’-s j-a-y—
four strokes plus a star mark reaching upward,
five strokes in answer close to the ground,
one stroke, then one
fathoming, and the whole,
aloft on the thermals,
blue as the pennants that reveal from the crosstrees
we are each the lost companion.
Details Depicted:
Insect and Hair
In the prison of an unnamed century,
on paper coarse as sackcloth,
someone has written No reason exists
and the innocency of my actings
in midst of the late revolutions.
Then stopped—and circled two perfect artifacts,
caught years before in the damp pulp:
in the margin beside his curving s,
a single fly wing, dried to a gauze,
and far down the page, an arc of amber beard hair.
And as he writes for leniency, for his place
within the fabric of place, the stars
above this terraqueous globe and the hazel wheat,
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—freedom, peace,
benevolence—and earn,
by his words, his flight.
Late day,
on the wind, two bells ringing in tandem,
sound and echo indistinguishable. No help
at all, the artifacts. Or augury. What good
is transcendence before the body, the natural,
upward arc reversed? As useless now
to elevate his humanness as to watch
the cobbled page withdraw, regain its rags,
its sacking, rope, its bits of salted fishing net.
If only time had stalled the fly—
and wing and hair were closer—his words
might ride them seamlessly, as sound
rides the ringing bells—globe and glint and citizenship
indistinguishable on the wind.
If only weight
were valued more than weightlessness.
But pulp has fastened each to its place
and he has encircled them.
Enthusiasm
• PASTEUR AT NAPOLEON’S PALACE
B. mori: an inconspicuous moth, stout, weak-winged …
larvae hairless, hook-tailed … second thoracic ring
humped … and from the spinnerets, three thousand feet
of silk thread. Here Pasteur quickened, the book’s words
stepping down to his favorite word, enthusiasm—
the god within—which, in its bald, Bombyxian way,
even the moth might feel as Rhythmically turning
in figure eights three hundred thousand times,
the ash-gray larval head casts its looped cocoon.
•
It was a time of cheap bread and parties,
grand public works and conspiracies. He quickened,
looked out at the palace trees, enthusiasm for the words—
and works—rising within him: the tireless heads
that spat the silk or cinched the empiry. He felt it,
there on the palace balcony, the god within,
the god who loped through the huntsmen’s hounds
or gasped in the Empress’s throat
as she bent to his microscope’s eyepiece
and saw within not the god but the world,
its spores and languid flagellates.
•
Benign, but related to the injurious lackeys.
Mulberry-feeding … reproduction continuous
in the warmer reaches. Pasteur nodded. It was a time
of injurious lackeys. Across the land, cocoons collapsed
and shriveled larvae peppered the lip-cast industry.
He nodded, enthusiasm for the moths, the cause, the cure,
tapped like a pulse beneath his pulse, rose in that dusk
as it always rose, season to season, past germs and bacilli
and parasites, even as he understood that the anti-life
infection shaped, the unmaking
t
hat it patterned, was every inch as intricate
as the silk that drooped from an Empress’s throat.
•
Now the moon appeared, pale in the palace trees.
He closed his book. In the courtyard below his balcony,
torch-bearing huntsmen were forming a large ring, one hunter
at the center, like a moon in a circle of stars. And again
it rose, enthusiasm for the ring, the hunter
now lifting skyward the dark, ceremonial flank of a stag.
Pasteur felt it again tapping as into the ring
the hunt hounds crept, then stopped, crept, stopped, crept,
stopped: enthusiasm for the ring, the hounds, the man within
who three times stopped them with a word.
Enthusiasm for the word, even when his counterword—
so close in sound, just an octave higher—
released them to the meat.
Darwin’s Mirror
He placed a small mirror between his study windows… .
Through reflection, he could watch me approaching,
down the curved lane from gate to door, as I,
looking back, imagine him rising from his wide chair,
•
and a bit of the hearth and foot cushion.
Whenever weather mottled the mirror, Comfort—
then Lettington—polished it, clipping back the foliage
•
to a living frame that held us equally. And then
I was in, walking behind him down the wide hall
and across the back veranda, then out
•
toward his sandwalk copse. The mirror bent down
from the outer wall much as the mirror at Saint Bartholomew’s
bends down from the organist’s loft. And I told him this,
•
as we moved past the phlox and portulacas
and the ghostly rattle of the well’s flywheel circled
behind us like locusts. From my pew in the empty church,
•
I knew that the mirror carried signals
up from choirmaster to loft—and didn’t reflect
the organist’s fingers down to the congregation, although
•
I imagined both, their seamless display cast down to me
through a slender cone of dust. Descent with modification—
but that is his phrase, not mine. And this
•
is his making: a long and narrow oval
shading a meadow’s outer rim: a copse of hazel,
dogwood, hornbeam, birch, their leaves, as we walk
•
through the seasons, first a rasp then a rattle.
History is closer now, I say. And did he know that crows,
perched in the northern regions, gather
•
a little arc of ice on—what is it called? Just under
the throat? Gorget, he says. Yes, on the puffed gorget.
The ice looks like a queen’s ruff. Or half-ruff,
•
nothing at the back, of course. In the hazel
just over our heads, the bird waits for a moment, regal
in its ruff of ice: a dark shape
•
we fashion together, gorget, black eye in a membrane
of lid. And although we know the ruff ends
where breath stops, we finish the circle anyway.
The Moths
• VIRGINIA WOOLF, 1940
Up through the war they stream, the blunt bombers,
rushing toward her unbidden between tea and dinner—
but no, the moths rushed toward her unbidden,
and years before, lovely, alit by the same luminous windows
•
she papered just this morning. After her walk on the marsh.
When guns rumbled on the Channel ports. But no,
it was thunder that rumbled, although under the storm
the guns of Flanders softly popped.
•
How the war obsesses. And she cannot form letters,
or forms them as echoes, words drawn back
through the years, their figures confused. No, fused—
for hadn’t the Messerschmitt, crashed on Caburn’s summit,
•
crowned the mountain like a blunt moth, wings extended?
There’s petrol saved for suicide, Leonard said,
should Hitler win. And on the lilacs? Perfect
summer weather. So they go on. Panic, then bowls
•
on the green lawn. The buzz of propellers just overhead
and, at sunset, the glow of Botten’s haystack.
Midway through her walk, when the air-raid siren bleated,
she looked to the haystack for refuge—a filigree
•
of camouflage—but no, the sky stayed clear
and she hurried on. Once, Duncan said, near Charleston,
high in the cloudless sky, he watched a bomber crumble—
instantly—just a flash and almost silent click.
•
Sunset. A wash of poppies in the corn. And do moths
circle the haystack’s almost light, as bombers circle
the almost seen? One weighted, one weightless,
one poisoned, one benign, bracketing the hour?
•
She cannot form letters. Looks out
through the marsh. Had she entered the sweet hay,
rewoven its skein above her, dropped back
and back through the years, until she was nothing
•
but cells in a larval slick, would the soul reopen,
borderless? But no—always—the outer bracket
closes. High in the cloudless sky, Duncan said,
silver pencil, puff of smoke.
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.
The Swifts
One August night, ten thousand.
Four thousand now, in this long, September dusk.
Some repeaters, staying over.
•
No first-growth stumps in sight—
no forests at all on this stretch of flyway—
and so they roost in a school’s brick chimney,
ten thousand then, four thousand now,
•
turning in wide, counterclockwise gyres
above the chimney’s rusted clockface, turning
their four-inch, half-ounce shapes, three heartbeats
per wingbeat, three heartbeats per clipped syllable
of each high-pitched cry, some repeaters,
•
staying over. Just to the west,
the sunset that stains their bellies
to
the dusty gold of mine canaries
•
slips over the gray Pacific, which to the east, under
Kentucky and Illinois, the root-tips of fossil forests
reach down through the roofs of coal-mine shafts.
Tropical then, the trees, three hundred million years ago,
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rain-filled, before the planet quickly warmed
and the magma shifted and the world’s first birds
cast their first neuronic blips
and the world’s first flocks answered in unison.
What? the miners asked, brushed on the nape
•
by a weightlessness three hundred million years
whittled. Only the roots of absence, tepid
across the skin. And tangible in that darkness
•
as the sudden blip that any moment now
will draw this flock, like airborne ash, backward
through the chimney. The cell-phone camera eyes,
like miners’ headlamps, tip up in unison
•
toward a micro-ounce of source too swift
for mystery. Wing dip? Cell click? Could the answer
be corporeal? Attention to the matter?
Their eyes are bigger than their beaks. Their sleep—
no opposable toes—is vertical. Just to the west,
•
a line of contrail draws us—
and down they drop, wings tucked, past
the chipped mortar and carbon dust, past the open flue,
the first birds overlapped by the next, and those
•
by the next, and next, climbing the chimney’s shadow shape
in four-inch repetitions. Ten thousand then,
four thousand now, upright on the bricks.
Pierrots, Slightly Leaning:
Brighton, 1915, Venice, 1903
• AFTER PAINTINGS BY WALTER SICKERT
War. Desire. In painting one, the last hours
brighten the wind-blown gas lamps, which light in turn
a wooden stage and beach chairs, a slouched pierrot
alert to an absent audience. In painting two
•
no Brighton at all, no gas lamps’ down-turned light
wind-blown to gull wings. Just costumed lovers—two—
alert to an absent audience. In painting two, embracing,
the shadowed figures fuse, he in white—his wizard’s cap
•
and gull-wing sleeves—loving the role, accustomed to
the secrecy, she in black, back toward us, a darkened
figure fused to white, shadowed by a wizard’s cap.
The time in painting one is war. Behind the knock-down stage
•
the sea creeps toward us, sheened in black, a darkened
hush climbing a darkened pier. Across the Channel, the guns
of Flanders—the time in painting one is war, the stage
is European, a knock-down shape shattered and regathered—
