by Linda Bierds
and hive doors. She opens her jacket and soft liner.
The bees, in their perfect circle, still.
Nancy Hanks Lincoln in Autumn: 1818
Thirst. And the slow pains of the stomach.
Her heart gives the sound of an oar through water, blunt
and diminishing, or the slipping of hooves over oak roots.
No window in view, yet the door near her bed
frames the nut trees and sycamores, the cows
folded down in a clearing. Like an alchemist’s mark
for infinity—loop beside loop, horizontal eight—
each body curls back to itself: shoulder arched, neck dipped,
head
stretched back to rest on a circle of hip.
Their milk will kill her, their journeys down game paths
to the white, forest blossoms of snake-root.
Bud high with poison, the vine plants rushed,
muzzle, to milk vein, to udder, to a thirst
whose final magnification seems a form of mockery.
An ax claps somewhere to her left. The table
with its belly of puncheon casts the shadow of a ferry,
as if the floor were again the flat Ohio,
Kentucky behind, Indiana just ahead in a chaos of trees.
Someone coughed then, she remembers. Sharp coughs,
skittering. Someone sang of the journey the soul
must make, little boat over water. Their home
took the color of chestnuts. She read aloud
from the fables of Aesop: foxes and eagles. The crow
and the pitcher—its water out of reach,
just off from the tongue, his beak at the rim
like ax strokes. To her left they are chopping,
then whittling a clearing with fire. They are stacking
ripped vines, saplings, and underbrush
like a plump wreath at the base of a sycamore.
It will burn in an arc-shaped heart, huge
and magnificent, dark veins of heat
ripping off at the edges. Will the birds break again then,
out from the trees? The passenger pigeons and parakeets
lift as they have in a thick unit, their thousand bodies
dragging the shadow of a wide pond
down over the game paths, down over the oak trees
and cattle, the doorframe, bedposts, cupped hands,
bellows, the cheese in its muslin napkin?
Until shape after darkened shape floats in a wash of air?
Thirst. Braiding every thought back to an absence.
She drinks from her cup. Drinks again. On a hillside
the children are laughing, called out from their sorrow
by the spectacle of flames. Or by birds
in a sudden jumble, perhaps. Or the placid cows
catching handkerchiefs of ash on their broad faces.
How simply two circles can yield to each other,
curl back to each other without ending:
raised shoulder, a dipping, raised hip.
The path an oar makes in water, in air, then in water.
Träumerei
All I have done in music seems a dream
I can almost imagine to have been real.
ROBERT SCHUMANN, 1810-1856
Perhaps this, then: the holystone licks
of the winter Rhine. A cleansing.
A scouring away. Anything to free him
from the constant filling.
Weeping, in slippers and dark robe, maddened
by phantom voices, music,
he walks from his house with
the tentative half-steps of a pheasant.
A little rain collects on his robe hem,
and street meal, the cubiform dust-chips
of cobblestones. He has carried no coin purse
and offers to the bridge guard
a silk face cloth, then the image
of a man in bedclothes, in the quarter-arc of flight
from raining to river.
There is wind—upward—
and the parallel slaps of his slippers.
With the abrupt closure of a trumpet mute
his heart stops. Then the music, voices. Water
has flushed through his robe sleeves, and
the thin, peppered trenches
between groin and thigh.
He will surface
as an opal surfaces: one
round-shouldered curve of brocade in the wave-chop.
Then his heart kicking back.
And the oarlocks of rowers who are
dipping to save him?
A-notes and A-notes—perfect—in unison.
What else but to starve?
The starched coats of asylum guards
give a fife’s chirrups. They are joined by
tintinnabulum, chorus, and oboe
on his brief walks to the ice baths.
At the first flat shocks and frigid clearings
he smiles, murmurs
that his madness is at least his love,
distorted, of course, pervasive, but still …
aural. A music. The trees
by the fenceline fill, release. One year,
two. He follows halfway, taking
into the self the quarter-notes of
footsteps, the cacophony of laughter, wagons, doors,
the hums of the candle-snuff.
Writing stops, then speech. No word,
no flagged dot on its spidery stave
to diminish the filling. What else but
to turn from all food, to decrease from without
like the August peaches? To take at the last
the fine, unwavering balance
of an arc—heart and perimeter—
a cup where all sound resonates? …
A bell has fallen in Moscow, he once wrote,
so huge it carried its belfry to the ground.
And into the ground. The bell lip
and shoulder boring deep in the earth. Then
a cross-rip of belfry. Then, through
the stark reversal of summer grasses,
four pale steps leading down.
The Grandsire Bells
At first quick glance and lingering second,
the five, sludge-smeared miners on the roadway—
through this pre-morning light, with their shock
of canary in its braided cage—
might have seemed to the five ringers approaching
like a portrait of memory, like the sway
and blear of themselves in memory: the bend
of bootsoles in the myrtle grass, black
caps, yellow lantern flame, the knapsack stings
of rhubarb and mildew. And the village
below, coal fires granting to the fresh day
plumes in the fashion of cypresses—base knot,
stalk, the splintering crown-tip—a kind
of memory also, as the ringers trudged
up the hillside, past the miners and smoke strings,
past the fluted iron churchyard fence, the dollops
of marble headstones. Then into the breezeway,
where belfry steps accepted the trudge,
and the bells, above, waited. Five. In a blend
of copper and tin, each shouldered the hub ring
of a great wheel, the bell ropes lashed to spokes
and threaded, the soft-tufted cordage
dangling down to the ringers like a spray
of air roots. With the motion of climbing
the treble was cocked, pulled up to suspend
■ ■ ■
at the balance point, waist and mouth-edge
inverted, hovering. Then the others cocked,
turned up, each ton of fish scale-glistening
arc at rest of a pin-tip of stay.
And toppled. One after one, treble, second,
third, fourth, tenor, topple
d. Quick pump and
spillage,
like heartbeats. Again, the ringers releasing
the strike and hum notes, handstroke to backstroke,
the bells pulled up, up, the snapping ropes wound
up, tail tufts and sally-grips in the jig-play
of dancers. All morning, the swinging
treble wound through its hunt path, a nudge
into second ring, third, fourth, and the second
replacing the tenor bell, and the third knocked
into lead. In the village the day
was a braiding of change-rings, notes swelling,
fading, as the bells turned. In the bracken
and mine shafts. In the foundry, when the forge
bellows hushed and the furnace tapway
spilled a rush of smoking bronze down bricklined troughs in the earth floor. Bell notes. When
bronze curled down through buried bell molds, cut
half-rings
in the earth, cut bell shapes. When the cupped clay
flared and stiffened. Bell notes. Change upon change.
Then ending. Ending. In an instant, closing back
in their first order. All ringers for that second
claiming past, present, like walkers on a roadway:
in the half-light of morning, one shock
of canary in a braided cage,
one curve of lantern flame approaching.
FROM The Ghost Trio (1994)
The Winter: 1748
Erasmus Darwin, 1731-1802
A little satin like wind at the door.
My mother slips past in great side hoops,
arced like the ears of elephants—
on her head a goat-white wig,
on her cheek a dollop of mole.
She has entered the evening, and I
her room with its hazel light.
Where her wig had rested is a leather head,
a stand, perfect in its shadow but
carrying in fact, where the face should be,
a swath of door. It cups
in its skull-curved closure
clay hair stays, a pouch of wig talc
that snows at random and lends to the table
a neck-shaped ring.
When I reach inside I am frosted,
my hand like a pond in winter, pale
fingers below of leaves or carp.
I have studied a painting from Holland,
where a village adjourns to a frozen river.
Skaters and sleighs, of course, but
ale tents, the musk of chestnuts,
someone thick on a chair with a lap robe.
I do not know what becomes of them
when the flow revisits. Or why
they have moved from their warm hearthstones
to settle there—except that one step
is a method of gliding,
the self for those moments
weightless and preened as my leather companion.
And I do not know if the fish there
have frozen, or wait in some stasis
like flowers. Perhaps they are stunned
by the strange heaven—dotted with
boot soles and chair legs—
and are slumped on the mud-rich bottom,
waiting through time for a kind of shimmer,
an image perhaps, something
known and familiar, something
rushing above in their own likeness,
silver and blade-thin at the rim of the world.
Memento of the Hours
First the path stones, then the shadow,
then, in a circuit of gorse and mint,
the room with a brook running under it.
It freshened the milk, the cream that grew
in its flat habit a shallow lacquer,
a veil I tested on slow afternoons
with a speckle of pepper.
There was butter, cheddar, the waxy pleats
of squash, green as a storm pond.
Walnuts. Three families of apple,
each with its circle of core fringe.
And the sheen on the walls
was perpetual, like the sheen
on the human body.
My mother would sit with me there,
her drawstring reticule
convex with scent jars and marzipan, the burled
shapes of the hidden. Once she brought her cut
flowers to chill until evening, and told me
the mouths of the bluebells
gave from their nectar a syrup elixir.
It holds in suspension the voices of choirboys,
she said. A dram of postponement.
And I felt as she spoke their presence
among us: the hum
of the brook just under our feet,
the mineral hush of the plenitude,
then the blackened robes of the blackberry vines
gradually filling the door.
Windows
When the cow died by the green sapling,
her limp udder splayed on the grass
like something from the sea, we offered
our words in their low calibrations—
which was our fashion—then severed
her horns with a pug-toothed blade
and pounded them out to an amber
transparency, two sheets that became,
in their moth-wing haze, our parlor windows.
They softened our guests with the gauze-light
of the Scriptures, and rendered to us,
on our merriest days, the sensation
of gazing through the feet of a gander.
In time we moved up to the status
of glass—one pane, then two—each
cupping in proof of its purity
a dimple of fault, a form of distortion
enhancing our image. We took the panes
with us from cottage to cottage,
moth-horn and glass, and wedged up
the misfitted gaps with a poultice
of gunny and wax. When woodsmoke
darkened our bricks, we gave
to the windowsills a lacquer
of color—clear blue with a lattice
of yellow: a primary entrance and exit
for light. And often, walking home
from the river and small cheese shop,
we would squint their colors to a sapling
green, and remember the hull
of that early body, the slap of fear
we suffered there, then the little wash
of recovery that is our fashion—how
we stroked to her bones a cadenced droning,
and took back from her absence, our
amber, half-literal method of sight.
The Reversals
Grit metals drawn to a bourbony syrup,
then the tiny ear trumpet is cast: hand-sized
cornucopia, one tendril of head band.
And the child who has followed this process, pickax
to flame, to the small, curved swelling in his day-pouch,
steps off on a mission to the faltering Beethoven,
just as the other, housebound, in a chaos of music sheets
and chamber pots, steps back through his mind
toward Holland. Late autumn. And by noon,
the ice on the deck rails is a lacework of gull prints.
There are waves, unbroken, rolling port to starboard
like a hammock wind. Deep cold. His hands
are made warm by a wrapping of scarf, his feet
by the black drapery of his mother’s lap.
Through his frost-fed and wave-rocked drowse,
three nuns on the deck are a gaggle of sea birds,
the arced wings of their huge headpieces
lifting their slender bodies… .
Music sheets. Chamber pots. One beckoning
metronome. And the ear trumpets
s
end off through his nerves
the sensations of a rake scraped over a harp.
Great pipe shapes. Ladles. Just a coolness in the palm,
then a warmth. Or lined up on the tabletop,
an orchestra of reversals, sucking sound
back in, bell to a pucker of mouthpiece.
A wind has begun in the clear day.
And perhaps they were spirits, there on the deck boards,
a ghostly trio lifting before him—no land
in sight, then his small body so suddenly
his body, so suddenly himself, the hands,
the feet in their soft shoes.
Now a child is standing in the open doorway,
the smallest of ear trumpets shining in his hand:
its perfect walls, the perfect, cupped vessel of it.
Look, he is mouthing, what
has risen from the earth to meet you.
Phantom Pain
Josiah Wedgwood, 1795
It speaks, now and then.
A lisp at the knee. A needle-trill
where the ankle once arced. Then I reach into air
or the concave disturbance of the bedclothes.
And nothing. A pain in an absence. A leg-shaped
absence in pain. I do not know
what it is that calls—
and burns then, unsummoned, like the summer fires
that flame through the bracken.
A low cloud blackens the larch trees.
We have opened the channel through Harecastle Hill
and the vases and flake-white medallions
float down its dark tunnel, the canal boats
slender as fingerlings. No tow path
exists there and the workers must
leg the boats through: propped on their backs
on the cabin rooftops
must stride down that starless ceiling,
not advancing at all, but
advancing all, walking the eggshell jasper bodies
through the dripping darkness.
They tell me the day draws nearer like a lantern,
like the day must arrive
for the climbing colliers: a whiteness
coming closer—but then, as if on the pond
of the inner eye,
the intricate, inverted brilliance of a maple.
A glimpse into heaven, perhaps, or its loss,
the image flicked upright in the questioning mind—
in an instant, already gone
even as it approaches, a form
flaring nearer while backing away.
The Swallows: 1800
Through the wet and continual trout-chill of earth,
he dropped with his father, past shale beds, black-slush,
down corridors greased with the seeping of springs,
and cranked in the darkness a stuttering flint wheel,
a wand that threw to the pickax and mine walls
quick jitters of light. The sparks left the wheel
in fractured arcs and brought from the darkness