by Linda Bierds
Inside them, lilies, lilies—
a thousand shades of white, I think.
Eggshell, oyster, parchment, flax.
Far down the black-mulched beds, they seemed
ancestral to me, the fluted heads of
dowagers, their meaty, groping,
silent tongues. They seemed
to form perspective’s chain:
cinder, bone, divinity …
4.
My father waved. The crows set down.
By evening, our fields took the texture
of freshened clay, a sleek
and water-bloated sheen, although no water
rested there—just heat and ash
united in a slick mirage. I crossed the fence line,
circled closer, the grasses all around me
collapsing into tufts of smoke. Then as I bent
I saw the shapes, rows and rows of tougher stems—
brittle, black, metallic wisps, like something grown
to echo grass. The soot was warm,
the sky held smoke in a jaundiced wing,
and as a breeze crossed slowly through,
stems glowed—then ebbed—
consecutively. And so revealed a kind of path,
and then a kind of journey.
Depth of Field
Specula. Gauze in a halo of disinfectant.
We sit in the small room, dimmed
by the X-ray of my father’s chest
and the screen’s anemic light. Because on film
the spots are dark, my mother asks
if, in the lung, they might be white: some
hopeless sense of the benign. My father smiles.
Outside the window, a winter storm
continues. Across the park, the bronze-cast generals
spur their anguished horses, each posture
fierce with rearing. Nostrils, lips, the lidless eyes.
Now all the flung-back heads have filled with snow.
After-Image
Three weeks past my father’s death
his surgeons, in pond-green smocks, linger,
trail after me from dream to porch, down
the bark and needle pathway toward the river.
One nudges me, explains, as he did weeks ago,
the eye’s propensity for opposites, why green
displaced their bleached-white coats. Looking up
from the tablet of a patient’s blood, he says,
the red-filled retina will cast a green
on every white it crosses. A phantom wash
on a neighboring sleeve. It startles us,
he tells me. And: Green absorbs the ghosting.
Then he is gone, the path
returning to boot brush and the squirrel ratchets
my father loved. It is noon, the sky
through the tree limbs a sunless white.
I have come to watch the spawning salmon
stalled in the shallow pools. Age
has burned them a smoky red, though
their heads are silver, like helmets. Just over
the mossy floor, they float unsupported,
or supported by the air their gills have winnowed.
I think I will gather them soon, deep
in the eye, red and red and red,
then turn to the canopy of sky and cedars.
It will support them soon, the green.
Six in All
Six
Behind my back, before my family, the elms
have flared, dropped leaves, regathered them in tiny buds.
Before me, behind my family, the limes are still,
drawn out through shades of darkening
by nothing more than light. Last night
I read a tracker’s lore, half truth, I think,
half wonderment—how, fleeing, one man mounted stilts,
another fastened to his soles the stiffened gnarls
of cows’ hooves. Such fussings over twists
in dust! But beauty, too, that one can read
a residue, that from the profile of a stride
a body might be crafted.
We’re faded now, my mother’s sleeve, my sister’s spidered
fists. For someone standing next to me,
we’re only hatchings on the glass, like
hairline prints the heron leaves,
its tracks across the sandy bank first shallow—here—
then deeper as a fish was snared, then deeper still
as, taking flight, it most was wedded to the ground.
But I’ve described a positive, the darkened prints
across the glass. In fact these hatch-lined negatives
echo what was pale in us. And if the bird had truly walked
in tandem with my family’s path, its tracks
would yield a vacancy, like whitened lashes
of the dead. In this inert, inverted world,
what most engaged the passing light tumbled first
to nothingness. My father lifts a brier pipe,
a soot-black bulb reversed to ice.
The stem, the bowl, the mouthpiece gone.
It is his smoke that lingers.
FROM The Seconds (2001)
The Seconds
Claude Laurent, glassblower, 1850
With a flurry of sidestrokes, the March wind
swims down the chimney, its air chafed
by hearth smoke and bacon. It is sunset,
and high on the inglenook shelf,
a gauze of crystal flutes
captures the lamplight. I am their maker—Laurent—
eased back in a soft chair, listening
to hearth logs sag through the andirons.
And thinking of seconds—first time, of course, then
the hapless devoted who step from behind
with their handkerchiefs and swords, ready to give shape
to another’s passion, as a body gives shape to a soul.
When the handkerchief crosses the damp grass,
they must wish it all back, the seconds:
that the handkerchief rise,
flap back to the hand, and the passion
pull back to its source, as the sword and the pistol
pull back to their sheaths.
Then everything silent, drawn in by some vast,
improbable vacuum—
as an orchestra of ear trumpets might silence a room!
Now the wall clock taps. Across my knees
the house cat casts her rhythmic thrum.
Once I lifted a flute, some second
blemished by a loll in the lime, and blew
through its crystal body a column of pipe smoke.
I remember its hover just over my chest,
a feral cloud
drawn down and bordered, it seemed
in that evening light, not by glass
but by itself.
Seconds and smoke …
Into what shape will our shapelessness flow?
Outside my window,
two children bob in the late light,
walking with their mother on the furrowed fields.
They love how their shadows
are sliced by the troughs—how, over the turned rows,
their darkened, elongated shapes
rush just ahead in segments, waving
their fractured sleeves. Now their mother
is laughing, lifting her arms and pale boot,
watching her sliced and rippled
shadow—whose parallel is earth, not she,
whose shape is taken not by her, but the cyclic light
her shape displaces. Now her head,
now her shoulder,
now the drop of her long coat
have stretched to some infinite black bay
pierced by the strokes of a black swan.
“Will You Walk in the Fields with Me?”
Early dueling challenge
They are matt
ed with frost
and a porous cloth that is the season’s first snow.
The fields. The seconds.
And the firsts, of course, their manored lords.
Seen from above in the dawn light, the burgundy,
snow-dappled cloaks of the lords
are two cardinal points of a compass,
its jittery needle defined
by the segmented footprints of sixteen paces.
It is the moment after turning. No one has fallen,
one bullet passing through a hat brim, the other
entering a birch tree with the sound
of a hoof through shallow ice.
At their fixed points, the lords wait. Winter wind
sails through their cloaks. They have entered the dawn
carrying no more than a sense of self, the magnetic pull
of decorum, and stand now, smiling a little,
satisfaction obtained by a hat brim,
by a birch that shivers in the early light, as
the seconds do, stomping in place in the snow.
They have entered the dawn carrying, in fact,
two bladders of salve, tourniquets browned
by an aging sun. No selves at all, they
are empty, waiting to be called, waiting to step forth
in another’s image—the hat plume and cloak,
after his likeness, the footfalls and trembling. Waiting,
with his grace, to make their turn,
while deep in the dawn’s new day, a little
circle of darkness draws a heart-high bead
and the beasts of the fields stand steaming.
The Last Castrato
1904
Buoyed by light, the gaping, bronze recording horn
floats near his upturned face, near his lips
that echo in their opaque sheen
the wax now turning at the horn’s slim tip.
He is offering Hasse’s aria—pale suns in the misty heavens,
the tremblings, the hearts. But the stylus slips
on the low notes and fricatives until only
something like emblem remains, a pale, une’en art
etching the cylinder’s tranquil curl. And so
he is asked to compromise: the lowered tongue, the softened
voice, a forfeiture for permanence. But compromise
has brought him here. And softening. And permanence
has poured its liquid bronze into the gap
the temporary held so steadfastly. He steps away, steps
back. What on earth to do? Encircle loss, finite
and full-throated, as the stylus drops his highs and lows,
his suns and heavens, his seamless climbs from heart to mist?
Or forfeit loss and, so, be saved?
Testament: Vermeer in December
To my daughter, Elsbeth, two loaf-sized, secret coffers.
To my sons, the pastel seascape.
And the peat chest. And the Spanish chairs, perhaps.
And the ivory-capped cane at rest on my bedstead.
And the sheets, and the ear cushions,
and the seventeen pocket handkerchiefs
that flap at the summons of each dawn’s catarrh.
Now and then, through their linen expanse
I revisit my children, in flight down an iced stream,
their sail-pushed sleds clicking, clicking
like a covey of walnut carts… .
To my servant, Bass Viol with Skull.
The wicker cradle. The ash-gray travel mantle.
To the men who will carry my coffin,
glass flasks—six—and a marbled flute
carved from the wing bone of a mute swan.
Its music may offer a tremoloed solace
as they lift from the gravesite my infant son.
Two years in the earth, his wooden box, darkened
by marl and a bleeding silt, will ride
my greater other like a black topknot
as we are lowered in tandem down the candlelit walls.
To my wife, the yellow jacket, silk and fur-trimmed,
that warms, through the mirror of a linseed wash,
a hazel-haired woman eternally lit by a pearl necklace.
She carries, with a dabble of madder and burnt ocher,
the wistful, enigmatic gaze of my children
as they circled the pale flute, dreaming they said of some
haunted voice, deep in a gliding wing, its song
both shrill and melodic,
like the cry of an infant controlled by a choir.
And to you, in half-rings around me, your faces
spaced like pearls … imagine that moment
when the ropes are lowered and something begins
on the lit walls, shape over shape: I leave it to you,
that shadowed conjunction of matter and light
that flies, in its fashion, between us.
The Magic Mountain
To sit on a balcony, fattened by lap robes and a fur pouch,
with the columbines nodding in their earthen pots
and the weighted autumn moon
already casting to the balustrade
a rim of tepid frost, is to know to the bones
the crepuscular slumber of bats—
alit between seasons of dawn and day, day and dusk,
and everything turning, perpetually… .
This evening’s soup was studded with cloves—
brown pods and corollas—the diminutive heads of
sunflowers.
To my left, in a neighboring balcony window,
a young man is dying, face turned to the ceiling,
his red chin beard sparse and pointed. He is joined
by a woman with a parchment fan, although I see only
her hand and cuff, the curve of a damask sleeve.
And a sky of rootless willows, gray, yellow-green,
pleated in parchment, swaying a little as the hand sways,
folding at last to a single stem. And then a sleight
of magic comes: from the fan’s handle
a face is formed, spar by closing spar.
Egyptian, I think. The hooded eyes. The slender beard.
Each spar tucks down to its thin contribution,
earlobe or cheekbone, a slice of brow—
and there! one full-blown, ivory face, perfect
on her damask knees.
Now the bats are aloft, stroking in pairs past the pallid moon.
Once, in the twilit dust of the X-ray room,
I saw on the screen a human lung,
abundant and veined as a willow.
In his bed the young man is stirring, and the woman
has lifted her parchment fan, the ivory face
shining a moment in the facets of lamplight
before its surrender to gray, yellow-green.
And which is the better, I wonder:
To gather from parts such a fullness?
Or to part into fullness so breathtakingly?
Pasteur on the Rue Vauquelin
Near the red blade of a furred poinsettia,
just to the left of the stamen cluster, a dragonfly slowly
dips and lifts. In the grasp of its tendril legs
floats a yellow almond, or a child’s thimble perhaps, or
some bulbous facet of light. It is dawn. The boy,
Joseph Meister, is sleeping, his necklace
of cauterized dog bites
glowing like topaz. In delirium,
he mumbles of scarves and ale tents, how a jester
thumbs back a tankard’s lid, and then—
the snarl of a weasel in a woven cap.
This is the grand hour, light coming toward me
in fragments, as if to prepare me
for its greater flood… .
When I was a boy, floods toppled the fence posts
and birches. And once,
; I watched at the depth of a shovel’s blade
yellow turnips afloat in a tepid sea. Their rocking
sent sets of concentric rings,
and there—three Saturns just under my feet!
Dawn. From my soft chair I am tempering rabies
with injections of … rabies! And tracking
the path of a yellow light, flower to memory to
a mirror of sky. How it dips and lifts
with its quick sting, synapse to synapse.
How that which invades us, sustains us.
The Highland
Zelda Fitzgerald, 1939
Dear One,
Do you have the time? Can you take
the time? Can you make
the time?
To visit me? The hospital doors have opened to spring,
and its land is high, dear one, each slope
with a vapor of crocuses. Its citizens, alas,
are low. Despondent, in fact, though a jar of sun tea
tans on the sill. The woman beside me
has opened the gift of a china doll, an antique
Frozen Charlotte. Glass face, a cap of china hair,
shellacked to the sheen of a chestnut.
At breakfast the shifting returned, dreadful
within me: colors were infinite, part of the air …
lines were free of the masses they held. The melon,
a cloud; and the melon, an empty,
oval lariat.
They have moved the canvas chair
from the window. Sun, enhanced
by the brewing jar, threw
an apricot scorch on the fabric. The fruit,
a cloud. The fruit,
a doll-sized, empty lariat.
D. O., into what shape will our shapelessness flow?
Dear One,
Italian escapes me. Still, I float to the operas
of Hasse and Handel, a word now and then
lifting through … sole, libertà. In an earlier time,
the thrum-plumped voice of a countertenor—half male,
half female—might place him
among us, we who are thickened
by fracturings. D. O., now and then, my words
break free of the masses they hold.
Think of wind, how it barks through the reeds
of a dog’s throat. How the pungent, meaty stream of it
cracks into something like words—but not. I just sit
in the sun room then, slumped in my fur and slabber,
feeling the wolf begin, back away, then some
great-jawed, prehistoric other
begin, back away, then the gill-less,
the gilled, then the first pulsed flecks
begin, back away, until only a wind remains,
vast and seamless. No earth, no heavens.
No rise, no dip. No single flash of syllable
that might be me. Or you.
D. O.,
Now a gauze of snow on the crocuses! I woke