by Linda Bierds
of course, just flight and its watery echo, red
over red, over red, as far as the eye could see.
Matins: Gregor Mendel and the Bees
Slowed by smoke, they slump
from the hive,
benign from the hive they slump,
Father of thorax and wing,
Father of light, they light
on my arm, make light
of my arm, tapering, golden,
Father of darkness receding,
they make from my arm
a candle, a flame, they candle
my arm with backcast
light, affixing the self
to the shell.
Prodigy
Lovely, he thinks, stepping off from the shoreline,
how the pond erases his shadow
in equal proportion
to the body its water accepts. Until, as shadow,
he is nothing, just head and an upraised arm—
while, pale in the pond, he is Benjamin Franklin,
a child with a kite on a string.
And now he is cargo, drawn by the wind,
as pond water slaps
and the kite’s red gills billow. Such pleasure,
shoulders to toes, all
down the slim, cirrus shape of his body,
to be pulled by the wind, half fish, half bird,
while horse carts clack down the Boston streets, deep
in their own progress, and shadows
slip westward, and the long fingers of tallow,
pale in his father’s shop, dip and thicken and dip.
Blue day. On the salt marsh hills, other boys play out
their landlocked strings, crisscrossing
the grasses, heavy as pendulums. Only one,
young Franklin, floats with his kite,
weightless and tethered in equal proportion.
White-knuckled, good-natured, he would wave
if he could. But he is a staple
binding the elements. White knot
at the end of a stitch. And lovely, he thinks, to be
both the knot and the stitch. That
is the secret, isn’t it? To be, at once,
all body, all soul. That is the key.
Gregor Mendel in the Garden
Black-robed on the green hillside,
he seems less shape than space—Abbot Napp—
a gap in a flock of April lambs.
Then wind opens his wide sleeves and the flock
scatters—his little ones, his progeny, bred, crossbred.
In this first morning light, I am turning
the garden, kneeling and rising, my apron flapping
its own dark wing. Such a daybreak of drops
and ascensions!—winter on the pebble, sunlight
on the nape, and the black soil swallowing
my pea seeds, like beads through a crow’s gullet.
With grace and patience, the Abbot
would cancel in his scattered lambs
the parasites, the strucks and toxin shards
that yearly fell them. But life’s eluded him
and so he breeds for beauty: a triple crimp in wool,
a certain glint in lanolin. And the spiral horn—
that curling cornucopia—corrugated, green-cast,
shaped, he says, by repetition’s needs.
(Not unlike your pea pods, Gregor.)
Beautiful, he tells me, those circling, dusty pleats.
And if only he could breed there some brief
continuation. Another swirl, he says, another turn
on matter’s slender axis. Another rise—Gregor—
another dip. Before the ripping tip.
Tulips, Some Said
When Abraham Ortelius fell in love with the world,
sometime in the autumn of 1560, and vowed to map
its grand expanse, its seas and serrated coastlines,
that the mind might hold, as it does an onion,
“the weighty, layered wholeness of it,”
a tulip was launched, from Constantinople’s limpid port
toward the deep-water docks of Antwerp.
Still tucked in its fleshy bulb, it rode
with a dozen others, rising and falling
near the textile crates, as the ship slowly crossed
the southern sun, past Athens and Napoli, Elba, Marseille.
This is the world, Ortelius said, holding up to his friend,
Pieter Bruegel, a flattened, parchment, two-lobed heart.
And this, Bruegel answered, paint still damp
on his landscape of games, each with its broad-backed child.
It was an autumn of chatter and doubt, wonder
and grief and a quick indignation, sharp as linseed.
Slowly the ship tracked the Spanish coast, rising
and falling as the rains began, and the olives darkened,
and red-tunicked soldiers, increasing their numbers,
rode north toward Flanders. When the bulb
of a tulip is parted—its casing is also a tunic—
it reveals to the eye the whole of itself, all it will need,
like a zygote cell, to enter its own completion:
roots and pulp and, deep at the center,
leaves and a coil of bud.
That is the world, said Pieter. And that, said Abraham,
each beholding the other’s expanse: on a single plane,
the oblong, passive hemispheres and, as if caught
by a closer eye, stocky, broad-backed, hive-strewn shapes,
alit in their grave felicity.
Mistaken for an onion, the bulb was roasted
near the Antwerp docks, then eaten with oil and vinegar.
Still new to the region, the others were buried in soil.
In Abraham’s early folios, South America blooms
from its western shore, articulating a shape
that has yet to appear, while in Bruegel’s dark painting,
a child on a hobbyhorse whips a flank of air.
Neither man lived to see, in 1650, at Nuremberg’s
Peace Fair and Jamboree, fifteen hundred boys
on their wooden horses, fifteen hundred beribboned manes.
Watched from the highest balconies, they filled the square
like tulips, some said. Like soldiers, said others.
Although none could be seen completely. At last, all agreed,
they gave to the square a muted, ghostly atmosphere,
like the moods in medieval tapestries
that hold in quiet harmony violence and a trellised rose—
although the sun that day was bright, all agreed,
and the wind splendid and clear, as it carried
the taps of those wooden hooves, and lifted
the ribbons this way and that, this way and that,
until night, like the earth, covered them.
Stroke
To stroke from stone the hovering bee—
to release from marble its white thorax—the hand
must turn back on itself, palm up, fingers curved,
with the gesture of skipping stones over water.
And to sculpt the wings, the hand must arc downward,
fingers stiff, with the gesture of rubbing grief
from the brow. And so, Gianlorenzo Bernini learned,
carving bees for the Pope’s family shield, for the churches
and Roman fountains: palm up
in the workshop, palm up in the world; fingers stiff
on the chisel and brow; hand curved to the hammer,
hand curved to the wine glass; palms pressed
for the wafer, palm up for the thorax, the coin,
for the quick rains that washed from his skin
the decades of white dust.
To free Saint Teresa to her ecstasy, or Daphne
to her leafed future, the hand must know first
the promise of wax. Or grap
hite. Or the tepid flesh
of clay. The hand must know first
the model. These are the angles, Bernini said,
for the animate, human form: acute, obtuse,
salient, reentering. Hour by passing hour,
his room filled with stone chips and ciphers,
the metallic scent of mathematics. Now and then,
a brief snow tempered his marble horses.
Now and then, migraine headaches made lace
of his world. These are the compasses, slipped
from their soft pouches. And these, the reflex angles
of their pivoting leg, when the hand, circling,
turns back on itself.
To curry from stone the texture of silk, or feathers,
or the fluid parchment of bee wings, the hand
must pursue the source, must open to fullness
the brief wing, or the downward slope
of the lover’s robe, so that stone might turn back
on itself, might climb through the strata of bedrock
and centuries to echo the living—just as the living
climb down into stone. These are the hand strokes,
Bernini said: frontal, alee, emergent, reentering.
For the climbing, shapes to their shaped reversals—
as, two days from his death, shapes would climb
through his right arm, through the long wick of his nerves:
little sparks, little Janus flames, lighting their own
departure. Then a thrum, he said. All through the flesh
that thrum. Bees. White bees.
Gregor Mendel and the Calico Caps
With tweezers light as a pigeon’s beak,
I have clipped from each stamen a pollen-filled anther:
hour by hour, three hundred tiny beads, dropped
in my robe’s deep pocket, their yellow snuff
sealing the seam lines. And thus,
I emasculate peas that would sire themselves.
Heresy, some say,
to peel back the petal, sever the anther, stroke
to the open blossom—with the sweep of a pollen-tipped
paintbrush—another blossom’s heritage.
Heresy, to mingle seed
fixed in the swirl of the world’s first week.
Rest, now.
The bird-beak tweezers mute on my lap.
In France, where orchards yield to upswept Alps,
they have tied to the legs of pigeons
parchment memoranda—silk threads
encircling the flaccid skin, and a burl of words
that lifts between neighboring rooftops.
Twofold, I believe,
the gift of those gliding wings:
for the mind, script,
for the soul, the sluiced shape of the thermals,
at last made visible to the upturned eye …
My fingers are weary. Snuff in the seam lines.
To ward off the breeze and the bee,
I have tied to each blossom a calico cap. Three hundred
calico caps. From afar in this late-day light,
they nod like parishioners in an open field,
murmuring, stumbling slightly through the green expanse,
as I, in my labors, am stumbling. And all of them
spaced, it appears, on the widening arc
of some grand design. Blossom and cap in some
grand design. Vessel and motion and the tinted threads.
Heresy? Have I not been placed on that widening path?
Am I not, in my calling, among them?
DNA
At hand: the rounded shapes, cloud white, the scissors, sharp,
two dozen toothpick pegs, a vial of amber glue.
It’s February, Cambridge, 1953,
and he’s at play, James Watson: the cardboard shapes,
two dozen toothpick pegs, a vial of amber glue.
White hexagons, pentagons, peg-pierced at the corners—
he’s at play, James Watson, turning cardboard shapes
this way, that. And where is the star-shot elegance
when hexagons, pentagons, peg-pierced at the corners,
slip into their pliant, spiral-flung alignments?
Where is that star-shot elegance? This way? That?
He slips together lines of slender pegs that quickly
split in two. (Pliant, spiral-flung, one line meant
solitude. But one to one? Pristine redundancy.)
He slips. Together, lines of slender pegs quickly
conjugate. White hexagons, white pentagons:
not solitude but—one, two, one—pristine redundancy.
So close the spiral shape, now. Salt and sugar atoms
congregate: white hexagons, white pentagons.
So close the bud, the egg, the laboratory lamb,
the salt and sugar atoms’ spiral shape. So close—
it’s February, Cambridge, 1953—
the blossom, egg, the salutary lamb. So close
at hand, the rounded shapes—cloud white—the scissors—sharp.
Questions of Replication: The Brittle-Star
Why now, under seven fathoms of sea,
with sunlight just a sheen on its carapace
and someone’s dark paddle stroking above?
Why, at this moment, does it lift from the reef
its serrated jaws, its four, undulant,
tendril arms—the fifth atomized
by a predator’s nudge—to begin
the body’s slow unbuckling? Near the reef,
a kick-dust of plankton hovers. And eelgrass.
And far down the sea floor, the true starfish
in their dank, illegible constellations.
What salt-rich analgesic allows
this self-division, as the disc parts
and tendril arms, each with a thousand
calcite eyes, sway into slender helixes?
Half disc and half disc. Limb pair; limb pair.
Two thousand eyes; two thousand crystal eyes—
that must notice now the emergent other,
aslant but familiar, slowly swimming away:
its butterflied, genetic list, its tendency
toward luminescence. Limb over limb,
where is it headed? And when will its absence
echo, adrift in the sea’s new weight?
Half shape; half shape—how far will it stroke
before loss, like daylight, lessens,
and the one that remains twines its optic arms
to look to the self for completion?
Redux
They darken. In the ponds and springs near Stuttgart,
the oblong newt eggs swell and darken, cells
and their daughters, afloat in a cytoplasmic bath,
splitting, re-splitting, until, swollen to fullness,
they stroke through the brimming world.
Milkweed, the scientist, Hans Spemann, thinks,
then peers through a microscope’s steady beam
to a shoal of landlocked seeds.
At his back, his newborn stirs in a wicker pram.
And because there is nothing softer at hand
Spemann saws through a two-celled newt egg
with a length of the infant’s hair,
the plump globe opening slowly, and the matter inside
already building its new borders.
Two, then. Two lives. And how many sires—
Hans Spemann thinks—and how many heirs?
If only the path were brighter, and the lens
finer. If only the hand were surer
and the blade sharper, and firmer,
and without the glint of time …
Desires
In autumn, 1879, on a day like today,
the physicist, Charles Vernon Boys,
touched to a spider’s quiet web a silver tuning fork,
its long A swimming a warp line, up and up.
>
The hour’s the same, the hemisphere,
and so the sunlight must have banked at this degree
across his buttoned sleeve, and the steady A
stroked a morning’s molecules
much like these—although the note I hear
is organ-cast, cathedral-bound, and the sleeve
this sunlight banks across
drapes in tempera from a saint’s clasped hands.
Godless in this god-filled room, I’m drawn less
to the saint’s sacrificial fate than to the way
like instruments vibrate sympathetically,
or how this painter’s ratio of bone to powdered umber
precisely captures a dove’s blunt beak. I’m drawn
to his abidingness, the hands that slowly milked
egg white from its yolk, and ground the madder root,
and shaved the gold, and sealed it all
in a varnish skin (although the skin’s a web now,
shot through with cracks).
Perhaps he whistled, low in his teeth,
a tuneless breath that dried the saint’s wet eye to matte.
Perhaps he scraped the iris back, and built
the ground, and scraped again, to make the light
interior (then varnished it, to make the light eternal).
Propped on a garden bench, a C-fork buzzed, Boys said,
whenever the A was struck. And the spider whirled.
Then down a warp line, desire’s leggy shadow
rushed—and rushed—scraping its beak
on the silver mass, silking the tines,
convinced until the last, Boys said,
all that hummed was food.
Nineteen Thirty-four
Radiant, in the Paris sun, the clustered chairs
and canopies, the clustered leaves, one and one
and one—and down the boulevard, the circus tent
in a blowsy park, the Hospital, boulangeries,
the Institute where Curie turns, then takes
in her blackened, slender fingers a finger-shaped
tube of radiation. And the blue Atlantic, radiant,
the American shore, the gold-flecked palette
Paul Cadmus lifts. It is a midday and sundown
in March. He will paint on the flank of an acrobat
a gilded skin. She will stroke down the test tube
a ticking wand. There is sunlight on their sleeves,
as the equinox shifts and the pale-bricked house
of Physics throws open its smallest doors. Radiant,
the boulevards and shorelines, the peat fields, polders,
steeple tops, the Appalachians, Pyrenees,
the river-etched terraces of Warsaw.
And the circus tent with its acrobats, stern-faced
and gilded, circling the ring on their parallel horses.
Radiant, their sudden shape, like fission’s sudden
pyramid: one on the shoulders of two, two