by Linda Bierds
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
FROM Flights of the Harvest-Mare (1985) AND The Stillness, the Dancing (1988)
The Stillness, the Dancing
Mirror
Tongue
Child in the Wagon
Pearl
Reviving the Geyser: Reykjavík, Iceland, 1935
Erebus
From the Ghost, the Animal
Wonders
Lesson: The Spider’s Eighth Eye
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp: Amsterdam, 1632
Zuni Potter: Drawing the Heartline
Wedding
The Klipsan Stallions
Mid-Plains Tornado
Strike
FROM Heart and Perimeter (1991)
The Shakers
For the Sake of Retrieval
April
Ringing
Bird in Space: First Study
White Bears: Tolstoy at Astapovo
In the Beeyard
Nancy Hanks Lincoln in Autumn: 1818
Träumerei
The Grandsire Bells
FROM The Ghost Trio (1994)
The Winter: 1748
Memento of the Hours
Windows
The Reversals
Phantom Pain
The Swallows: 1800
Hunter
Held
Westray: 1992
Desire
Flood
Seizure
The Skater: 1775, Susannah Wedgwood at Ten
Lautrec
Care: Emma Wedgwood Darwin, 1874
The Fish
FROM The Profile Makers (1997)
Six in All
Six in All
The Three Trees
Altamira: What She Remembered
Six in All
The Geographer
Van Leeuwenhoek: 1675
Six in All
Shawl: Dorothy Wordsworth at Eighty
The Suicide of Clover Adams: 1885
Vespertilio
Six in All
Edison: 1910
Muybridge
Six in All
Burning the Fields
Depth of Field
After-Image
Six in All
FROM The Seconds (2001)
The Seconds
“Will You Walk in the Fields with Me?”
The Last Castrato
Testament: Vermeer in December
The Magic Mountain
Pasteur on the Rue Vauquelin
The Highland
Concentration
Orbit
Latitude
Grand Forks: 1997
The Circus Riders
FROM First Hand (2005)
Prologue
Time and Space
Counting: Gregor Mendel in the Prelacy
Thinking of Red
Matins: Gregor Mendel and the Bees
Prodigy
Gregor Mendel in the Garden
Tulips, Some Said
Stroke
Gregor Mendel and the Calico Caps
DNA
Questions of Replication: The Brittle-Star
Redux
Desires
Nineteen Thirty-four
Vespers: Gregor Mendel and Steam
Sonnet Crown for Two Voices
New Poems
Sketchbook
Meriwether and the Magpie
Dürer near Fifty
Navigation
Thoughts Toward the First Christmas Lecture
Fragments from Venice: Albrecht Dürer
Biography
From Campalto
Accountancy: Dürer in Antwerp
Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice
Details Depicted: Insect and Hair
Acqua Alta
Salvage
From the Sea of Tranquillity
Flight
ALSO BY LINDA BIERDS
First Hand (2005)
The Seconds (2001)
The Profile Makers (1997)
The Ghost Trio (1994)
Heart and Perimeter (1991)
The Stillness, the Dancing (1988)
Flights of the Harvest-Mare (1985)
A MARIAN WOOD BOOK
Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons
Publishers Since 1838
a member of the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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(a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia),
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24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2008 by Linda Bierds
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned,
or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do
not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation
of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bierds, Linda.
Flight: new and selected poems: Linda Bierds.
p. cm.
“A Marian Wood book.”
eISBN : 978-1-440-64197-8
I. Title.
PS3552.1357A
811’.54—dc22
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Marian Wood, all
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Ahsahta Press for allowing me to reprint these poems from Flights of the Harvest-Mare: “Lesson: The Spider’s Eighth Eye,” “Mid-Plains Tornado,” “Mirror,” “Tongue,” and “Zuni Potter: Drawing the Heartline.”
My thanks as well to The Rockefeller Foundation for a month-long residency in Bellagio, Italy, during which much of this book was shaped, and to the editors of journals in which a number of new poems first appeared:
Alhambra Poetry Calendar (2008): “Navigation”; The Atlantic Monthly: “Sketchbook”; Bellingham Review: “Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice”; Blackbird.com: “Meriwether and the Magpie”; Field: “Salvage”; The Journal: “Thoughts Toward the First Christmas Lecture”; The Laurel Review: “Dürer near Fifty”; Northwest Review: “From the Sea of Tranquillity”; Poetry: “Accountancy: Dürer in Antwerp” and “Flight”; Poetry Northwest: “Fragments from Venice: Albrecht Dürer” and “From Campalto.”
Finally, and always, my gratitude to Sydney Kaplan, for the life that led to this work.
FROM Flights of the Harvest-Mare (1985) AND The Stillness, the Dancing (1988)
The Stillness, the Dancing
I am indefinitely capable of wonder.
FEDERICO FELLINI
Long ago, in the forests of southern Europe,
just south of Mâcon, a woman died in childbirth.
&nbs
p; She was taken, by custom, to the small slate
lip of a mountain. Legs bound at the knees
she was left facing west, thick with her still child.
Century by century, nothing disturbed them
so that now
the bones of the woman cup the small bones
of the child: the globe of its head angled
there, in the paddle and stem of her hips.
It is winter, just after midday. Slowly,
shudder by civilized shudder, a train slips over
the mountain, reveals to its weary riders
something white, then again, something
white at the side of the eye. They straighten,
place their lips to the glass, and there, far
below, this delicate, bleached pattern,
like the spokes of a bamboo cage.
What, someone whispers, and What, What,
word after word bouncing back from its blossom
of vapor, the woman and child appearing,
disappearing, as the train slips down through the alders—
until they are brands of the eyelid, until they are
stories, until, thick-soled and silent,
each rider squats with a blessing of ocher.
And so there are stories. Mortar. A little stratum
under the toenails. A train descends from a mountain,
levels out, circles a field where a team of actors
mimics a picnic. The billowing children.
On the table, fruit, a great calabash of chilled fish.
And over it all, a beloved uncle, long mad,
sits in the crotch of an oak tree.
He hears to his right, the compressed blare
of a whistle—each sound wave approaching shorter, shorter,
like words on a window, then just as the engine passes,
the long playing out.
He smiles as the blare seeps over
the actors, the pasture, the village
where now, in the haze of a sudden snowfall,
a film crew, dressed for a picnic, coaxes a peacock
to the chilled street. Six men on their knees
chirruping, laughing, snow lifting in puffs
from the spotlights. And the peacock,
shanks and yellow spurs high-stepping, high-stepping,
slowly unfolds its breathless fan, displays
to a clamor of boxcars, club cars—
where riders, excited,
traveling for miles with an eyeful of bones
see now their reversal.
In an ecstasy of color the peacock dips,
revolves to the slow train:
each rider pressed to a window,
each round face courted in turn.
Mirror
Before the mirror, water gave it
back, the brown surface of another’s eye …
It is High South Africa, 1630.
Rabbles of sailors press down the Zambezi.
Now, strewn out through their empty camp:
burlap, fig stones, and this—
this oblong, black-backed glass.
Clear night. The first creep in
from the bushwood, sifting.
This is my face, one whispers. A flush
like a thud in the brain. This is my face,
unrippled. Its pockets and stains. Its long
surprise.
A mynah calls in her seven voices:
Aye Aye Aye Aye …
Something lifts up through the mangroves.
Something sets in.
Tongue
I did not know that my fingers were spelling
a word, or even that words existed.
HELEN KELLER
Imagine another,
blind, deaf since birth.
One, nearly two, she squats at the lip
of a shallow pond. Above her,
the day exchanges its sunlight, clouds.
This she feels in blushes across her shoulders.
With a sleepwalker’s grope
she is reaching, patting the cold grasses,
and now, from a tangle of water cardinals
she has plucked a pond-snail. Moist and shell-less
it sucks across her palm.
Tongue, she senses, the simile
wordless, her fingers tracing the plump muscle,
the curling tip.
Someone approaches. To the bowl
of her free hand, the name is spelled,
the tingling sn and ail.
Again. Again.
And soon she will learn. The naming.
The borders of self,
other. But for now, propped in the musky
shoregrass, it is tongue she senses,
as if the snail, mute, in the lick
of its earthy foot,
contained a story. As if her hand
received it.
Child in the Wagon
The child in the wagon remembers a sound:
leaves that clicked down the cobblestones
like the toenails of running dogs.
It was evening. She turned, expecting the worst,
and found instead the swirl of madrona leaves
and then on the street corner
candle flames cupped in their glass boxes.
It will not hear that sound again, she thinks,
and looks to her left, right,
where the long Conestoga wagons bumble
through the switchgrass. There are forty, indigo
and red, moving not single file but abreast,
their hoops and canvas hoods swaying white, and
seen from above, the child thinks, like a wave
spilling into the harbor, its line of froth
and the dust swelled up behind like a second wave.
So the pattern continues, until day ends
and the center wagons stall, all their horses
simply stepping in place as the end wagons
arc toward one another and the wagoners
on their lazyboards draw up
their perfect circle, like the nets of Maine fishermen.
That evening, near sleep on the floorboards,
the child describes to her parents
the sound of madrona leaves, running dogs.
How, for an instant, fear passed through her
like an icy tooth—the long-haired sea dogs
rushing in from the ships—
and then there was nothing: leaves, a certain peace.
And that sound … like this? her mother whispers,
clicking knives to a pewter cup. Then the father—
who will die in October, his cheeks in miniature
the caved salt cliffs they are leaving—
begins, tapping this, that, this, that,
until the wagon, in its circle of wagons, fills.
And there on the canvas, the child thinks,
how beautiful the hand shadows are:
great moths come in from the wilderness.
Like this? they ask. Like this?
As if in a moment, the absolute sound
might appear—then the dogs rush past, thick with loss.
And there would be peace.
Pearl
First the skip stutters down its rail-line
and the miners, stacked together, knee to knee-back,
stomach to buttock, watch
the clouds, one Douglas fir, a V-tip
of station roof, condense, condense, until
everything they have walked through is a little moon
shining one hundred, one thousand feet,
and exchanged now, from below, for a sparkle
of dusty headlamp—
its growth, like a moon, then
the face and great-boots.
It is always raining. Always
the temperature of sliced ham cooled on a platter,
a placemat, these things of another world.
/>
And unfolded, the miners step into their day, which is
night, walking behind one another
out through the drift tunnels.
An ore cart wobbles by, steaming
with quartz rubble, a little gold perhaps,
the size of a thumbnail, pushed up
from the earth’s molten center, through the molten veins,
pushed and pushed—the great pressure, great heat—
to this exact intersection of
vertical, horizontal… .
Ears pop.
Someone is singing. And beyond,
from another chamber, comes the whistle of nitrate
billowing up from its spitter fuse.
Now and then some tremble may continue, up
through the ankles, thighs. There is the wheeze
of a bank collapsing, and into the drift tunnel
creep the poisons of powder fumes, methane.
It is then, with the motion of bathers, that
the miners dip into their airmasks, bite
down, and turn together, all
the headlamps reversing their light
to its first horizon.
And nothing can stop what follows,
not science, not the elements:
in a grave interaction of chemicals, saliva,
the airmask biteplates begin heating.
Past the mulch and black-slush, into the skip,
up through the timbers, they grow hotter,
hotter, scorching the tongue,
the palate, until the miners, trapped by a halo
of methane, by the slow pull
of the skip-cable, feel their hearts withdraw, feel
their nerves collect in this new center, foreign
and not—all the flames pushing off,
regathering—the great heat, great pressure—
foreign and not.
But for their eyes, these workers are the color of
quartz rubble, stacked
and lifted … lifting … past the shale beds,
limestone, from the rain into the rain …
and here is that moon, swelling to meet them—
old ghost, old platter of steam—
and here is the world of the world.
Reviving the Geyser: Reykjavík, Iceland, 1935
from a photograph by Jon Dahlman
One man in a derby hat, another
in leggings, and a woman
with the brown, sensible shoes of a chemist.
Just behind these friends
is a thermal circle of
dwarf willow, eyebright, and heath—
and before them, the slack basin,
no hiss and bellow, no steam
hurling up its magnificent stitch.
There is urgency on these faces.
Already the snows creep
closer to this mild setting,
like a ringmaster’s animals.
To encourage pressure, the man
in the derby hat drops
chunks of pan soap through the quiet water.