by Linda Bierds
They sink like yellow skulls,
and then on the surface
he sees the rippling legs of the woman,
his own small face in its black topknot.
A woodcock sings from a tangle of willow.
The man thinks of his wife at the loom, how
often in the late, thin light her beautiful arms
cross and recross the breast beam
with the strokes of a swimmer.
There is pain in his shoulders, in
his pale neck stretched
over the basin. He thinks of a time
when love, in terms of
his place in the world, was everything.
Erebus
Even in the rigging there is chaos,
the foremast and mainmast square-rigged,
the mizzenmast and jibs fore-and-aft-rigged, so their lines
cut in at slants, sharp and terrifying,
like the slant-lights of the Scriptures.
And their flurry is extended to the deck,
where snow curls up with the chocks.
By midnight the waterbuckets freeze, each claiming
at dawn a wafer of thumbskin, peeled back
from its slick under-mate like the eyelids of the dying.
We are just below forty now: Franklin, Fitzjames,
the surgeons, ice-master, thirty seamen, and cook.
And a small bird the color of celadon,
of the hummocks and fog-green fjords stumbling
off from the shoreline. It carries just under a wing
a circle of fuchsia down, blinking out
now and then like our lost sun.
Northwest Passage! Not even a harbor. Barrow Strait,
Boothia, Cape Felix. And the days are lessening.
We inch to the south as the icebergs themselves inch off
from the main-pack: the crack and rustle,
the slow letting go.
What world is this that tightens under us—
each time the wind recedes, freezes
under us, leaving just our small bouquet
of masts and grindstones, a hogshead of sugar?
Now and then, ice-locked in this awkward
and constant half-light, we walk over the floes,
watch the simple flight-strokes of snow bunting,
then carry their image to our own companion.
It washes its wings in cabin air.
As the fuchsia circle blinks out, again and again,
we practice our game of resemblances, creeping
closer to all we have been:
God’s eye, someone offers. Or ember.
Raw thumb! A taffeta underskirt.
Or a blossom a bullet might leave,
on its journey to a darker harbor.
From the Ghost, the Animal
Of all the figures in delirium tremens, the most common is the gray dog.
Not the rat, then. We assumed it was the rat,
scratching up not hell exactly, but
the path there. We assumed
it was the spider, leech,
each in from its Gothic other, those zones
with us and not, like sleep.
But the dog, gray dog—
flock-guider, companion for the slow
rowing—pads in from the hallway,
your life in tow.
And please,
there is something wrong with the light,
this muzzle, honed to a trowel,
its jab, retreat, this
dirge through a smile of froth. Up
from your ribs, lungs, up
from the hollows you walk through—
wind, black shoe, the sun at your eyelids,
the simple bread—up from the ghost
and the animal, you answer—bellow,
hideous whine—while he slumps to the floorboards,
clear-eyed, pants Run
with me, darling, the meadows, the lost day.
Wonders
In a wide hoop of lamplight, two children—
a girl and her younger brother—jump marbles
on a star-shaped playboard. Beside them,
in a chair near a window, their father
thinks of his mother, her recent death
and the grief he is trying to gather.
It is late October. The hooplight spreads
from the family, through the window,
to the edge of a small orchard, where
a sudden frost has stripped the fruit leaves
and only apples hang, heavy and still
on the branches.
The man looks from the window, down
to a scrapbook of facts he is reading.
The spider is proven to have memory, he says,
and his son, once again, cocks his small face
to the side, speaks a guttural oh, as if
this is some riddle he is slowly approaching,
as if this long hour, troubled with phrases
and the queer turn in his father’s voice,
is offered as a riddle.
There is the sound of marbles
in their suck-hole journeys, and the skittery
jump of the girl’s shoe
as she waits, embarrassed, for her father
to stop, to return to his known self, thick
and consistent as a family bread.
But still he continues,
plucking scraps from his old book, old
diary of wonders: the vanishing borders
of mourning paper, the ghostly shape
in the candled egg, beak and eye
etched clearly, a pin-scratch of claw.
A little sleet scrapes at the window.
The man blinks, sees his hand on the page
as a boy’s hand, sees his children bent over
the playboard, with the careful pattern
of their lives dropping softly away, like
leaves in a sudden frost—how the marbles
have stalled, heavy and still on their fingers,
and after each phrase the guttural
oh, and the left shoe jumping.
Lesson: The Spider’s Eighth Eye
These three things then: They have eight eyes.
They have memory. Their images do not overlap.
They leave the brood-cocoon when the last grains
of yolk rattle in their pearly bellies.
Each climbs a blade of grass, a twig,
a splintering fence … anything sharp and solitary.
Here they send a thread-hook for the wind.
The launch is terrifying: Whipped to a current,
gusted, their legs sucked behind at first
like so much hair. But somehow they shinney,
and they ride those gossamer V’s like arrowheads.
This process—the launch, the travel—this is
called ballooning. Some balloon for days.
They are often found in a ship’s rigging
hundreds of miles from shore.
Or matting an airplane windshield, like cloud-frays.
Those who survive live their lives where the current
drops them. They do not balloon again.
Now, finally, the eyes. They can not converge.
One pair may see you—not as a face, exactly,
but a pale avoidance—just as another sees
the mantel tray, like a gold sun
without heat or shadow.
The eighth eye is tucked below, and has a range
no higher than your knee. It sees only floors,
soil, crackles of plaster. It is the memory eye.
Sometimes when a draft gusts under the door,
or wind whisks the porch, the eighth eye remembers.
It is all very fast—just a spark, in fact:
The wide rush of sea, perhaps a few whales below,
like sun-spots. And then the great, flapping
net of a sail
.
Of course, the wind should be very brisk.
But since there is memory,
this is how it must be.
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp: Amsterdam, 1632
High winter. All canals
clogged with an icy marrow. And the flax—
just a blue wash in the mind of
the painter who puffs up the tower stairs.
It is the time for festival—Aris Kindt
is hanged. And soon
up through these same stairs, up
to the slope-seated deal and chestnut
Theatrum Anatomicum, the surgeons will come:
Mathys and Hartman, Frans, Adriaan,
three Jacobs, then the bleeders and barbers,
the wheelwrights, needle-makers, goldsmiths,
the potters and sculptors, two
thin-chested harehounds. A lesson!
A dissection! All the reverent, mercantile faces
peering off through the scaffolds
that are now just empty, just a deal and chestnut funnel tapered down to a corpse: Aris Kindt. Quiver-maker. One necklace of rope-lace curled under his ears—while over his body, the shadow of a painter’s hat circles, re-circles, like a moth at a candle.
So this is fresh death, its small, individual teeth.
Rembrandt walks past the breechcloth, then the forearm
soon to split to a stalk that would be grotesque
but for its radiance: rhubarb tendons
on a backdrop of winter. He swallows,
feels the small dimplings of lunch pork
drop away. And here will be Tulp,
his tweezers and white ruff. And here,
perhaps Hartman, perhaps the shadow of
a violet sleeve closing over the death-face.
It is commissioned: eight faces
forever immortal, and one—slightly waxen—
locked in mortality! He smiles.
How perfect the ears, and the pale eyelids
drawn up from the sockets
like the innerlids of pheasants. Just outside a window,
the day has climbed down to the amber color
of this candlelit room. Rembrandt turns,
crosses out past the sponges and vessels.
There is the sputter of wagon wheels through a fresh ice,
and in all the storefronts
torches hang waiting for a pageant—
scarlet blossoms for a new spring.
His room has turned cold with the slow evening.
Far off in a corner
is a canvas clogged with the glue-skin of rabbits—a wash
of burnt umber, and the whites
built up, layer by layer.
Now a fire, the odor of beets.
And here, where the whites buckle, will be Tulp,
perhaps Mathys, their stunned
contemplation of death. He touches a spoon,
then a curve of plump bread. All across his shoulders
and into his hairline winds a little chill,
thin and infinite, like a thread-path
through the stars:
there will be umber
and madder root, yellow ocher, bone-black,
the scorch of sulfur, from
the oils of walnut and linseed—all things of the earth—
that forearm, that perfect ear.
Zuni Potter: Drawing the Heartline
Through the scratch-strokes of piñon, the hissing
arroyos, through the clamped earth
waxed and swollen,
coil to coil, paddle to anvil,
the bowl on her palm-skin blossoms,
the bowl on her lap
blossoms, the lap blossoms
in its biscuit of bones.
Bract-flower, weightless, in the pock and shimmer
of August, she slopes from the plumegrass like
plumegrass. And the white skull
bobbles and turns. The gingerroot fingers
turn. Through the cocked mouth
of a buck deer, she sketches an arrow,
its round path nostril to heart.
For the breath going in.
For the breath going out.
Wind to heartbeat. The blossoms of steam.
Wedding
from the painting by Jan van Eyck
Wait. The groom stops,
right hand in mid-air, mid-ceremony,
about to descend to the cupped right hand
of the bride. What is that noise?
At their feet, the ice-gray griffin terrier stops.
Two puff-shouldered witnesses just entering
the chamber, just entering the scene
through the iris of a convex mirror,
stop. And follow a curling sight-path
from the elegant to the natural: from the dangling
aspergillum and single ceiling candle, down,
past the groom’s velvet great-hat, his Bordeaux robe,
past the stiff-tailed lapdog, the empty
crow-toed wooden sandals, to
a trail of yellow apples—desk, ledge, windowsill
and out. There. Below. It is
the rasp of water casks on the hunt mares, squeezed
stave pin to stave pin, as
they are shouldered across the canal bridge. And the mares—
how brilliant in the high sunlight:
one roan, one walnut, eight legs
and the rippling ankles rippling again
where the slow Zwin passes under. In a moment
they will cross, step on with their small cargoes
past inns, the great cloth halls steaming with linens.
The mudflats have dried now. All their patterns
of fissures and burls like the rim
of a painter’s palette. Once or twice
the cones of yellow flax straw will flicker,
the autumn birch leaves flicker,
the mares lurch left, then
right themselves—nothing to fear after all: not wind, motion.
Not even a sleeve of sackcloth slipped over the hoof.
To quiet the hunt. To make from its little union
not a predator, but a silence.
Just the half-light of forests, black leaves
on their withered stems,
then the graceful, intricate weave closing over
the mossy sole—as a hand might be closed
by a descending hand,
pale, almost weightless, and everywhere.
The Klipsan Stallions
Just one crack against the sandbar
and the grain freighter crumbled into
itself like paper in flames, all the lifeboats
and blankets, the tons of yeasty wheat
sucked down so fast the tumbling sailors
still carried in the flat backs of their brains
the sensations of the galley, smoky with mutton fat,
someone’s hiccup, someone’s red woolen sleeve
still dragging itself across their eyes
even as the long sleeve of the water closed over them.
It was 3 a.m., the third of November, 1891.
Just to the south of this chaos, where the Columbia
washes over the Pacific,
there was shouting, the groan of stable doors,
and over the beachfront, a dozen
horses were running. Trained
with a bucket of timothy to swim rescue,
they passed under the beam of the Klipsan lighthouse,
passed out from the grasses, alfalfa,
deep snores and the shuffle of hooves,
and entered the black ocean.
Just heads then, stretched nostrils and necks
swimming out to the sailors
who were themselves just heads, each brain
a sputtering flame above the water.
Delirious, bodies numb, they answered
the stalli
ons with panic—
So this is the death parade, Neptune’s
horses lashed up from Akasha!
And still,
through some last act of the self, when
the tails floated past they grabbed on,
then watched as the horses
returned to themselves, as the haunches
pulled, left then right, and the small circles
of underhooves stroked up in unison. Here
was the sound of sharp breathing, troubled
with sea spray, like bellows left out in the rain,
and here the texture of sand on the belly,
on the shirt and thigh, on the foot
with its boot, and the naked foot—and then, finally,
the voices, the dozens gathered to
cheer the rescue, the long bones of the will,
causing hands to close over those rippling tails,
yellow teeth to close over the timothy.
Mid-Plains Tornado
I’ve seen it drive straw straight through a fence post—
sure as a needle in your arm—the straws all erect
and rooted in the wood like quills.
Think of teeth being drilled, that enamel and blood
burning circles inside your cheek. That’s like the fury.
Only now it’s quail and axles, the northeast bank
of the Cedar River, every third cottonwood.
It’s with you all morning. Something wet in the air.
Sounds coming in at a slant, like stones
clapped under water. And pigs, slow to the trough.
One may rub against your leg, you turn with a kick
and there it is, lurching down from a storm cloud:
the shaft pulses toward you across the fields
like a magician’s finger.
You say goodbye to it all then, in a flash over
your shoulder, with the weathervane so still
it seems painted on the sky.
The last time, I walked a fresh path toward the river.
Near the edge of a field I found our mare, pierced
through the side by the head of her six-week foal.
Her ribs, her great folds of shining skin,
closed over the skull. I watched them forever, it seemed:
eight legs, two necks, one astonished head curved
back in a little rut of hail. And across the river
slim as a road, a handful of thrushes set down
in an oak tree, like a flurry of leaves
drawn back again.
Strike
First the salt was removed,
then the axes and powderhorns,
the blankets, jerky, shot-pouches, gourds,
the kettles and muslin, the burlap torsos of
cornmeal, and the wagons hauled on the coil of rope,
hand over hand, up
the last granite face of the High Sierra,
dangling, wobbling fat in that wind like lake bass,
then the oxen, pushed up the spidery trail—