Flight: New and Selected Poems Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  FROM Flights of the Harvest-Mare (1985) AND The Stillness, the Dancing (1988)

  The Stillness, the Dancing

  Mirror

  Tongue

  Child in the Wagon

  Pearl

  Reviving the Geyser: Reykjavík, Iceland, 1935

  Erebus

  From the Ghost, the Animal

  Wonders

  Lesson: The Spider’s Eighth Eye

  The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp: Amsterdam, 1632

  Zuni Potter: Drawing the Heartline

  Wedding

  The Klipsan Stallions

  Mid-Plains Tornado

  Strike

  FROM Heart and Perimeter (1991)

  The Shakers

  For the Sake of Retrieval

  April

  Ringing

  Bird in Space: First Study

  White Bears: Tolstoy at Astapovo

  In the Beeyard

  Nancy Hanks Lincoln in Autumn: 1818

  Träumerei

  The Grandsire Bells

  FROM The Ghost Trio (1994)

  The Winter: 1748

  Memento of the Hours

  Windows

  The Reversals

  Phantom Pain

  The Swallows: 1800

  Hunter

  Held

  Westray: 1992

  Desire

  Flood

  Seizure

  The Skater: 1775, Susannah Wedgwood at Ten

  Lautrec

  Care: Emma Wedgwood Darwin, 1874

  The Fish

  FROM The Profile Makers (1997)

  Six in All

  Six in All

  The Three Trees

  Altamira: What She Remembered

  Six in All

  The Geographer

  Van Leeuwenhoek: 1675

  Six in All

  Shawl: Dorothy Wordsworth at Eighty

  The Suicide of Clover Adams: 1885

  Vespertilio

  Six in All

  Edison: 1910

  Muybridge

  Six in All

  Burning the Fields

  Depth of Field

  After-Image

  Six in All

  FROM The Seconds (2001)

  The Seconds

  “Will You Walk in the Fields with Me?”

  The Last Castrato

  Testament: Vermeer in December

  The Magic Mountain

  Pasteur on the Rue Vauquelin

  The Highland

  Concentration

  Orbit

  Latitude

  Grand Forks: 1997

  The Circus Riders

  FROM First Hand (2005)

  Prologue

  Time and Space

  Counting: Gregor Mendel in the Prelacy

  Thinking of Red

  Matins: Gregor Mendel and the Bees

  Prodigy

  Gregor Mendel in the Garden

  Tulips, Some Said

  Stroke

  Gregor Mendel and the Calico Caps

  DNA

  Questions of Replication: The Brittle-Star

  Redux

  Desires

  Nineteen Thirty-four

  Vespers: Gregor Mendel and Steam

  Sonnet Crown for Two Voices

  New Poems

  Sketchbook

  Meriwether and the Magpie

  Dürer near Fifty

  Navigation

  Thoughts Toward the First Christmas Lecture

  Fragments from Venice: Albrecht Dürer

  Biography

  From Campalto

  Accountancy: Dürer in Antwerp

  Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice

  Details Depicted: Insect and Hair

  Acqua Alta

  Salvage

  From the Sea of Tranquillity

  Flight

  ALSO BY LINDA BIERDS

  First Hand (2005)

  The Seconds (2001)

  The Profile Makers (1997)

  The Ghost Trio (1994)

  Heart and Perimeter (1991)

  The Stillness, the Dancing (1988)

  Flights of the Harvest-Mare (1985)

  A MARIAN WOOD BOOK

  Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  a member of the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia),

  250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd,

  11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd,

  24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2008 by Linda Bierds

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned,

  or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do

  not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation

  of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bierds, Linda.

  Flight: new and selected poems: Linda Bierds.

  p. cm.

  “A Marian Wood book.”

  eISBN : 978-1-440-64197-8

  I. Title.

  PS3552.1357A

  811’.54—dc22

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Marian Wood, all

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to Ahsahta Press for allowing me to reprint these poems from Flights of the Harvest-Mare: “Lesson: The Spider’s Eighth Eye,” “Mid-Plains Tornado,” “Mirror,” “Tongue,” and “Zuni Potter: Drawing the Heartline.”

  My thanks as well to The Rockefeller Foundation for a month-long residency in Bellagio, Italy, during which much of this book was shaped, and to the editors of journals in which a number of new poems first appeared:

  Alhambra Poetry Calendar (2008): “Navigation”; The Atlantic Monthly: “Sketchbook”; Bellingham Review: “Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice”; Blackbird.com: “Meriwether and the Magpie”; Field: “Salvage”; The Journal: “Thoughts Toward the First Christmas Lecture”; The Laurel Review: “Dürer near Fifty”; Northwest Review: “From the Sea of Tranquillity”; Poetry: “Accountancy: Dürer in Antwerp” and “Flight”; Poetry Northwest: “Fragments from Venice: Albrecht Dürer” and “From Campalto.”

  Finally, and always, my gratitude to Sydney Kaplan, for the life that led to this work.

  FROM Flights of the Harvest-Mare (1985) AND The Stillness, the Dancing (1988)

  The Stillness, the Dancing

  I am indefinitely capable of wonder.

  FEDERICO FELLINI

  Long ago, in the forests of southern Europe,

  just south of Mâcon, a woman died in childbirth.

&nbs
p; She was taken, by custom, to the small slate

  lip of a mountain. Legs bound at the knees

  she was left facing west, thick with her still child.

  Century by century, nothing disturbed them

  so that now

  the bones of the woman cup the small bones

  of the child: the globe of its head angled

  there, in the paddle and stem of her hips.

  It is winter, just after midday. Slowly,

  shudder by civilized shudder, a train slips over

  the mountain, reveals to its weary riders

  something white, then again, something

  white at the side of the eye. They straighten,

  place their lips to the glass, and there, far

  below, this delicate, bleached pattern,

  like the spokes of a bamboo cage.

  What, someone whispers, and What, What,

  word after word bouncing back from its blossom

  of vapor, the woman and child appearing,

  disappearing, as the train slips down through the alders—

  until they are brands of the eyelid, until they are

  stories, until, thick-soled and silent,

  each rider squats with a blessing of ocher.

  And so there are stories. Mortar. A little stratum

  under the toenails. A train descends from a mountain,

  levels out, circles a field where a team of actors

  mimics a picnic. The billowing children.

  On the table, fruit, a great calabash of chilled fish.

  And over it all, a beloved uncle, long mad,

  sits in the crotch of an oak tree.

  He hears to his right, the compressed blare

  of a whistle—each sound wave approaching shorter, shorter,

  like words on a window, then just as the engine passes,

  the long playing out.

  He smiles as the blare seeps over

  the actors, the pasture, the village

  where now, in the haze of a sudden snowfall,

  a film crew, dressed for a picnic, coaxes a peacock

  to the chilled street. Six men on their knees

  chirruping, laughing, snow lifting in puffs

  from the spotlights. And the peacock,

  shanks and yellow spurs high-stepping, high-stepping,

  slowly unfolds its breathless fan, displays

  to a clamor of boxcars, club cars—

  where riders, excited,

  traveling for miles with an eyeful of bones

  see now their reversal.

  In an ecstasy of color the peacock dips,

  revolves to the slow train:

  each rider pressed to a window,

  each round face courted in turn.

  Mirror

  Before the mirror, water gave it

  back, the brown surface of another’s eye …

  It is High South Africa, 1630.

  Rabbles of sailors press down the Zambezi.

  Now, strewn out through their empty camp:

  burlap, fig stones, and this—

  this oblong, black-backed glass.

  Clear night. The first creep in

  from the bushwood, sifting.

  This is my face, one whispers. A flush

  like a thud in the brain. This is my face,

  unrippled. Its pockets and stains. Its long

  surprise.

  A mynah calls in her seven voices:

  Aye Aye Aye Aye …

  Something lifts up through the mangroves.

  Something sets in.

  Tongue

  I did not know that my fingers were spelling

  a word, or even that words existed.

  HELEN KELLER

  Imagine another,

  blind, deaf since birth.

  One, nearly two, she squats at the lip

  of a shallow pond. Above her,

  the day exchanges its sunlight, clouds.

  This she feels in blushes across her shoulders.

  With a sleepwalker’s grope

  she is reaching, patting the cold grasses,

  and now, from a tangle of water cardinals

  she has plucked a pond-snail. Moist and shell-less

  it sucks across her palm.

  Tongue, she senses, the simile

  wordless, her fingers tracing the plump muscle,

  the curling tip.

  Someone approaches. To the bowl

  of her free hand, the name is spelled,

  the tingling sn and ail.

  Again. Again.

  And soon she will learn. The naming.

  The borders of self,

  other. But for now, propped in the musky

  shoregrass, it is tongue she senses,

  as if the snail, mute, in the lick

  of its earthy foot,

  contained a story. As if her hand

  received it.

  Child in the Wagon

  The child in the wagon remembers a sound:

  leaves that clicked down the cobblestones

  like the toenails of running dogs.

  It was evening. She turned, expecting the worst,

  and found instead the swirl of madrona leaves

  and then on the street corner

  candle flames cupped in their glass boxes.

  It will not hear that sound again, she thinks,

  and looks to her left, right,

  where the long Conestoga wagons bumble

  through the switchgrass. There are forty, indigo

  and red, moving not single file but abreast,

  their hoops and canvas hoods swaying white, and

  seen from above, the child thinks, like a wave

  spilling into the harbor, its line of froth

  and the dust swelled up behind like a second wave.

  So the pattern continues, until day ends

  and the center wagons stall, all their horses

  simply stepping in place as the end wagons

  arc toward one another and the wagoners

  on their lazyboards draw up

  their perfect circle, like the nets of Maine fishermen.

  That evening, near sleep on the floorboards,

  the child describes to her parents

  the sound of madrona leaves, running dogs.

  How, for an instant, fear passed through her

  like an icy tooth—the long-haired sea dogs

  rushing in from the ships—

  and then there was nothing: leaves, a certain peace.

  And that sound … like this? her mother whispers,

  clicking knives to a pewter cup. Then the father—

  who will die in October, his cheeks in miniature

  the caved salt cliffs they are leaving—

  begins, tapping this, that, this, that,

  until the wagon, in its circle of wagons, fills.

  And there on the canvas, the child thinks,

  how beautiful the hand shadows are:

  great moths come in from the wilderness.

  Like this? they ask. Like this?

  As if in a moment, the absolute sound

  might appear—then the dogs rush past, thick with loss.

  And there would be peace.

  Pearl

  First the skip stutters down its rail-line

  and the miners, stacked together, knee to knee-back,

  stomach to buttock, watch

  the clouds, one Douglas fir, a V-tip

  of station roof, condense, condense, until

  everything they have walked through is a little moon

  shining one hundred, one thousand feet,

  and exchanged now, from below, for a sparkle

  of dusty headlamp—

  its growth, like a moon, then

  the face and great-boots.

  It is always raining. Always

  the temperature of sliced ham cooled on a platter,

  a placemat, these things of another world.
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  And unfolded, the miners step into their day, which is

  night, walking behind one another

  out through the drift tunnels.

  An ore cart wobbles by, steaming

  with quartz rubble, a little gold perhaps,

  the size of a thumbnail, pushed up

  from the earth’s molten center, through the molten veins,

  pushed and pushed—the great pressure, great heat—

  to this exact intersection of

  vertical, horizontal… .

  Ears pop.

  Someone is singing. And beyond,

  from another chamber, comes the whistle of nitrate

  billowing up from its spitter fuse.

  Now and then some tremble may continue, up

  through the ankles, thighs. There is the wheeze

  of a bank collapsing, and into the drift tunnel

  creep the poisons of powder fumes, methane.

  It is then, with the motion of bathers, that

  the miners dip into their airmasks, bite

  down, and turn together, all

  the headlamps reversing their light

  to its first horizon.

  And nothing can stop what follows,

  not science, not the elements:

  in a grave interaction of chemicals, saliva,

  the airmask biteplates begin heating.

  Past the mulch and black-slush, into the skip,

  up through the timbers, they grow hotter,

  hotter, scorching the tongue,

  the palate, until the miners, trapped by a halo

  of methane, by the slow pull

  of the skip-cable, feel their hearts withdraw, feel

  their nerves collect in this new center, foreign

  and not—all the flames pushing off,

  regathering—the great heat, great pressure—

  foreign and not.

  But for their eyes, these workers are the color of

  quartz rubble, stacked

  and lifted … lifting … past the shale beds,

  limestone, from the rain into the rain …

  and here is that moon, swelling to meet them—

  old ghost, old platter of steam—

  and here is the world of the world.

  Reviving the Geyser: Reykjavík, Iceland, 1935

  from a photograph by Jon Dahlman

  One man in a derby hat, another

  in leggings, and a woman

  with the brown, sensible shoes of a chemist.

  Just behind these friends

  is a thermal circle of

  dwarf willow, eyebright, and heath—

  and before them, the slack basin,

  no hiss and bellow, no steam

  hurling up its magnificent stitch.

  There is urgency on these faces.

  Already the snows creep

  closer to this mild setting,

  like a ringmaster’s animals.

  To encourage pressure, the man

  in the derby hat drops

  chunks of pan soap through the quiet water.