Flight: New and Selected Poems

by Linda Bierds

  of the filaments, their tendrils and curls,

  the lateral braids of their journeys,

  find echoes—just there on the side tables,

  hearth board—in the rims of my father’s vases.

  We have always visited the soil.

  The ink, the marl of it. And made with each piece

  a kind of cessation. A pause. Like the moments

  one enters in late afternoon, a field perhaps,

  or that shadowy climate just west of the door,

  when the world’s noises suddenly stop—

  no leaves, wind, no song birds. That hush,

  that instant, before it all rushes on.

  The cameo heads are the white of snow drifts.

  And delicate, the bridge of a dowager’s nose

  like a hairline quiver on the inner eye …

  I remember one March my father,

  on a fractured mantle of snow, dragged us

  by horseback through the moorland fields, a rope

  from the saddle to my cousin’s sleigh,

  then backward to my brother’s, then backward

  to mine. Steam bloomed from our various mouths.

  And the brittle spindles of new broom, the star-nubs

  of heather, the young fern, springing back

  through the snow as each rider passed over,

  offered the sound of rice paper folding—

  or better, unfolding. Two hands releasing

  the gift of it. Such concentration. Such care.

  The Fish

  Tomorrow I look forward to a greater harvest.

  CHARLES DARWIN, 1832

  Month after dry month, then suddenly

  a brief rain has delivered to the fractured hillsides

  a haze of grass. So sparse it might be

  a figment of the heart. Yet its path

  on the outstretched hand is true—brush and retreat—

  like the breaths of a spaniel.

  There are buried in the decks of certain ships

  melon-sized prisms of glass, dangling their apices

  to the cabins below. Through

  their forked, pyramidic ziggings, daylight

  is offered to the mess tables, to the tinware,

  the gun-gray curlings of salt-tongue.

  Not rainbowed at all, the light

  approaches the face of each sailor

  in segments, like the light in a spine of

  train car windows. Then fuses, of course, when it

  marries the retina, its chopped evolution

  lost in the stasis of the visible.

  We turn homeward soon. I remember

  the seam lines of southern constellations, and the twin

  tornadoes of a waterspout: one funnel

  of wind reaching down from a cloud,

  one funnel of sea reaching upward. They met

  with the waist of an hourglass—in perfect reflection,

  as we, through the Archer, the Scorpion, the Painter,

  call forth from the evening some

  celestial repetition of our shared churnings.

  We shattered the spout

  with shotguns that kicked like the guns of my childhood

  when leaves were a prune-mulch and my sisters

  stood at the rim of the orchard.

  Katty. Caroline. Susan. Marianne.

  In the temperate wind, their dresses and sashes,

  the variegated strands of their hair, were

  the nothing of woodsmoke. Steam.

  I cannot foretell our conclusion.

  But once, through a pleat-work of waves,

  I watched as a cormorant caught and released

  a single fish. Eight times. Trapped and released.

  Diving into an absence, the fish

  reentered my vision in segments, arcing

  through the pivot of the bird’s beak. Magnificent,

  I thought, each singular visit, each

  chattering half-step from the sea.

  FROM The Profile Makers (1997)

  Six in All

  Preface

  Across the buckled, suck-hole roads,

  my cousin, Mathew Brady’s aide, bobbed

  toward our scattered camp, his black-robed,

  darkroom “whatsit wagon”—its pling

  of glass plate negatives—half hearse, half cloaked

  calliope. The Civil War was undeveloped

  and camp was thick with families, the fields

  a hail of slumping tents, their canvas cupping

  counterpanes, quilts with hubs of rising sun.

  He posed us near our tent’s propped flap,

  Father, Mother, my toddler sister cupped over

  my hip, then waved us to a sudden freeze—

  except for Jane, whose squirms became a handkerchief

  or dove wing on the ether plate. He took

  my father, stiff against the summer larch,

  then Mother’s ragged silhouette—the two of them,

  and us again, and Jane asleep. Six in all,

  my family and a chronicle of passing light,

  the day by half-steps slipping down

  across our hair and collarlines.

  In later years, the war long cold, he found

  in surplus its brittle song: long rooms

  of glass plate negatives, with lesser ones,

  he told me—the sunken corpse, the sunken soldier

  sipping tea—revived as greenhouse windows.

  The houses are magnificent, glass rows of amber

  apparitions, that disappear, he said, when rains

  begin. That melt, for human eyes at least, into

  a kind of nothingness. Then only metal frames

  are seen, square by empty square,

  like netting on the land.

  I would find our family, he said, across

  one building’s southern wall,

  where tandem trunks of windblown oak

  arc toward hothouse limes …

  Six in All

  One

  From balsa’s weightless wood my father carved

  the horse, then smoothed it to a foal,

  then further still, into a kind of moon—horse yet,

  and yet the head in soft relief was lunar, undefined—

  as his is now, within the greenhouse wall. Erased

  by my cousin’s breath, perhaps, upon the plate, across

  the damp collodion—his sigh or hum, some humanness

  that hovers still, between my father’s collarline

  and globes of hothouse limes.

  Two years beyond this negative, my father drowned

  off Georgia’s shore—so twice was slain by breathing.

  They say on death the lungs accept the sea, inhale

  its foreign element, the way I think the shutter’s mouth

  draws time inside to timelessness.

  Before he died, he wrote that flocks of braying mares

  were dropped by sling from battleships to waiting scows,

  their stiffened legs like canes, he said,

  the flashing cane-tips of their hooves.

  “For those of us on wet-decked scows, a dozen times

  they broke the sun, a dozen dust-caked underbreasts

  cast their quick eclipse …”

  And did I recall our balsa foal? From rye and fern,

  from loops of waxy thread, how we wove her green arena?

  “God, to have that footing now!—turf instead of

  sickly sea, that swings me like some sling-strung beast.”

  Within the plate glass negative, he waits

  near summer larch: boots sharp, coat sharp, but face

  dissolved to white. Across the plate’s transparent sky,

  the hothouse air has spawned an emerald scum,

  a silken vegetation that spreads

  its spidered reach. He stands below, coat sharp,

  boots sharp, his head dissolved to cloud.

/>   It will support him soon, the green.

  The Three Trees

  Late day. A wash of claret at the window.

  And the room swells with the odor of quince,

  tin-sharp and dank, as the acid creeps down

  through the etch marks. He dips the foreground languidly,

  Rembrandt, so thickets will darken, the horse

  and lovers resting there, the bamboo latitude

  of fishing pole, the shadowed river.

  Then inks it all—mixed sky, three dappled trees—

  and presses the intricate net of it

  to the white-bleached etching sheet below: one skein

  of storm aligning the nothingness, one haycart

  rich with villagers. At the window now,

  a fading to ochre. And beyond,

  through the streets and valley, at the base

  of a hillock thick with three trees, a hunter

  is ringing a treble bell, its quick bite

  driving the field birds to the sheltering grasses.

  Around him, dark in their earth-colored clothes,

  others are throwing a slack-weave net

  out over the meadow and scuttering birds.

  And up from their various hands, quick fires bloom,

  rush through the beard grass, the birds bursting up

  to the capturing net, some dying of fright,

  some of flames, some snuffed by the hunters

  like candles. A breeze begins, slips through the tree limbs.

  Slung over each hunter are threadings of birds,

  strung through the underbeak. Pleat-works of plenitude,

  down the back, the curve of the shoulder.

  They offer their warmth in slender lines,

  as sunlight might, through the mismatched shutters

  of a great room, the long gaps casting

  their cross-hatch. As if time itself might spin them all

  down some vast, irreversible pathway—

  haycart, hunter, small bowl with its blossoms of quince—

  and the simple patterns resting there

  barred everything back from the spinning.

  Altamira: What She Remembered

  That, chased by a covey of hunters, the fox

  slipped into its den

  exactly as bread slipped into her father’s mouth:

  white with a tapering backstroke of brown.

  That the hunters at the den door

  chopped and chopped with their black heels.

  That the cave they revealed, child-sized but

  humid with promise, ticked

  with a placid rain, as if the weather

  of the sky were the weather of the earth.

  That she saw on the cave walls, in blue-black

  and ochre, “the bulls,” although they were bison,

  she learned, and a dipping hind.

  That the borders of her body were the borders

  of the weather.

  That whatever awakened within her there—

  not grief, not fear—had the sound

  of hooves down a cobbled street.

  That they lifted her back by one arm.

  That, as she walked with her father

  through the downland, the sound of the hooves

  settled.

  That whatever awakened within her there

  had the sound of birds

  flushed from the downland grasses.

  Had the sound of leaves from a pitchfork’s tines.

  Years later, had the ticking sound of the rain.

  Six in All

  Two

  “Now hold,” he said, his bloated word

  afloat in the black-cloaked chamber.

  And Mother stopped in profile. She had turned

  to witness lifting moths, their thrum

  across the oaks, then held to watch that tuft of air

  that was the moths, empty yet filled

  with tracks of the missing, like

  the crease her cast-off headscarf left,

  crown to milky ear. I stood outside the camera’s frame,

  near tables fat with yellowed shirts and vats

  of crystal vinegar. Beyond the oaks, a soldier

  worked against a plow, leaned back across

  its harness straps, as if to cancel cultivation,

  as if to close the trough that foamed before him.

  His uniform was stiffened wool, his shirt fresh blue

  against the field: half farmer still, half infantry,

  a slanted shape that branched between

  two worlds of burial.

  My mother swallowed, saw the shutter spiral down,

  her face a blend of dust and wonder—

  that she might gather over glass, that she might claim,

  across the flecks of bromide salt, some bygone self.

  The sunlight cast quick glints against the plow,

  across the rippling skins of vinegar.

  My mother laughed, stepped forward

  through the grass. Once she penned a note in vinegar’s ink—

  invisible, but for blisters wetness leaves. Like magic,

  she said, how heat will mark each letter’s path. Some greeting,

  I think, her words so short-lived their birth

  was withdrawal. We held the page to a candle’s flame

  and letters stroked up on mottled wings.

  Then “Look,” she whispered, “their quickening shapes:

  the thumb-plump, the sickled,

  the branching-away …”

  The Geographer

  from the painting by Vermeer

  There. Out the window. They are burning the flood fields.

  And the light that touches his forehead

  is softened by smoke. He is stopped in a long robe,

  blue with a facing of pumpkin. In his hand,

  the splayed legs of a compass taper to pin tips.

  It is noon. Just after dawn, he took

  for his errant heart a paper of powdered rhubarb

  and stoops to the window now, half in pain, half

  in love with the hissing fields:

  mile after mile of cane stalks, fattened

  with drawn water. Such a deft pirouette, he thinks,

  flood pulled up through the bodies of cane, then

  water cane burned into steam, and steam like mist

  on the fresh fields, sucked dry for the spring planting.

  Powdered rhubarb. Like talc on the tongue.

  And what of this heart, this blood? Harvey writes

  that the washes of pulse do not ebb, do not

  flow like the sea, but circle, draw up to the plump heart.

  And is that the centering spirit then? Red plum,

  red shuffling mole? …

  When the flood waters crested, the dark coffins

  bobbed down through the cane stalks like blunt pirogues.

  And then in the drift, one slipper

  and the ferreting snouts of radishes.

  He touches his sleeve, looks down to his small desk,

  pale in its blanket of map, all the hillsides

  and carriageways, all the sunken stone walls

  reduced to the sweep of a pin tip.

  They are burning the flood fields—such a hissing, hissing,

  like a landscape of toads. And is that how blood

  circles back in its journey, like water through

  the body of the world? And the great, flapping fire, then—

  opening, withering—in its single posture

  both swelling and fading—is that the human heart?

  Van Leeuwenhoek: 1675

  All day, the cooper’s hoops squeal and nibble.

  Through the single eyepiece of his hand-ground lens,

  he watches a spider’s spinnerets, then the tail-strokes

  of spermatozoa. Now and then, his bald eye unsquints,

  skates blindly across his wrist and sleeve—

  and
makes from his worlds their reversals:

  that of the visible and that of the seen …

  Visible? he is asked, at the market, or the stone tables

  by the river. The lip of the cochineal? Starch

  on the membranes of rice? But of course—

  though a fashioned glass must press and circle,

  tap down, tap down, until that which is, is.

  Until that which is, breaks to the eye.

  It is much like the purslane, he tells them,

  that burst from the hoofbeats of horse soldiers:

  black seeds long trapped in their casings, until

  the galloping cracked them. In the steppes, he says,

  or veldt, where nothing in decades had traveled.

  Then flowers burst forth from the trauma

  of hoof-taps, and left in the wake of the soldiers

  a ribbon of roadway as wide as their riding.

  Smoke now. The screech of a shrinking hoop.

  His thoughts are floral with hearth flames and soldiers,

  the cords in his bent neck rigid as willow.

  Then slowly, below, something yellow begins. Some flutter of

  yellow on the glass plate, in the chamber of a tubal heart …

  By winter, the snows crossed over the flanks

  of the horses, felling them slowly. And the soldiers,

  retreating, so close to survival, crept

  into the flaccid bellies. Two nights,

  or three, hillocks of entrails steaming like

  breath. Now and then they called out

  to each other, their spines at the spines

  of the long horses, and the flaps of muscle

  thick shawls around them. Then they rose, as a thaw

  cut a path to the living.

  … A flutter, yellow, where an insect heart ripples

  in reflex. But no, it is only light and shadow, light

  turning shadow. As the perfect doors, in their terrible

  finitude, open and open.

  He straightens, feels his body swell

  to the known room. Such vertical journeys, he thinks,

  down, then back through the magnifications

  of light. And the soldiers, their cloaks

  like blossoms on a backdrop of snow:

  surely, having taken through those hours

  both the cradle and the grave,

  they could enter any arms and sleep.

  Six in All

  Three

  That we could block these warring worlds—the native

  from the fashioned—would make my mother flinch,

  although she dips against the larch with languid

  resolution, Jane in fever at her feet, my father

  with his pipe bowl lifted, pinched,

  as he might gently pinch

  some brier sparrow into flight … that

  on this greenhouse wall our faded wisps of family,

  reduced to amber filaments, could keep