Flight: New and Selected Poems Page 3

  in the concave crooks of their shanks,

  the mules, centered and pushed—

  and then it was all restored.

  Soon the nut pines yielded to scrub pines, the wind

  to the screams of the handcarts—

  wooden axles, wooden wheel hubs,

  day after day, the haunting, wooden voices.

  Now and then, the lowland flashed up

  through the trees, russet and gold-filled:

  Ophir, Mineral Bar, the American River. Then

  the scrub pines gave way to the black oaks, the wistful

  manzanitas. On the bank of a river-fork

  someone knelt, pinched the gravel,

  plump and auriferous. Two others

  talked of their journey, and the journey

  of gold, of their last descent and that climbing:

  fold-fault and lifting, erosion,

  glaciation, explosion,

  the magma and silica scratching upward,

  pin-step by pin-step to meet them.

  All night the rain washed over the wagons,

  cut down through the wheel ruts and fire-pits,

  the powdery topsoil, as if to say

  Deeper, just a little deeper,

  and in the morning, pulled up in the muzzles

  of mules, dangling in the grassy root-tips,

  that gold dust, that ending.

  FROM Heart and Perimeter (1991)

  The Shakers

  Picture a domino. A six perhaps, or placid

  four. And resting upon it, like the grids in some

  basement windows, three thin vertical lines.

  This is a staff—for the dance notations of Rudolf Laban.

  Torso twists, step turns and wrist folds,

  gallops, jumps, all the motions

  a body might make—in space, in time—

  contractions, rotations, extensions, from head tilt

  to the crook of the left thumb’s outer segment,

  spatter the staff in symbols. Black dots

  and miniature boxcars, tiny rakes

  for the fingers, double crosses for the knees,

  the right ear’s sickle, the eyebrow’s mottled palette,

  each intricate sketch on its half inch of grid line—

  until a string of speckled rectangles

  might tell us a foot was lifted,

  set down at a slant on the metatarsus,

  as a man might step down a path of loose stones.

  In the late-morning light, on the road to New Lebanon,

  his elbow jumps with its bucket of lake bass.

  Now and then, a whistle begins, spreads

  into song, then the slack-cheeked slip into piety.

  By midday his movements are rhythmic,

  have become this dance passed down

  through the centuries, then trapped in a patchwork

  of labanotation. Two circles: one men, one women.

  Stage left, a singer, a pulse of percussion.

  The music begins and the circles are carriage wheels,

  then closer—almost touching—are the black-specked wheels

  of a gear: one men, one women, in turn almost

  touching, then the arms flung up in denial,

  the bodies flung back into rippling lines,

  fused, yet solitary, like a shoal of lake bass.

  If there were lanterns then, they are lost here,

  and smoke, the odors of sawdust, linseed.

  But the costumes are true—white bibs and transparent

  skullcaps, each foot in its column of black boot—

  and the dancers strive with an equal devotion,

  as if the feat of exact repetition were a kind of

  eternity. Black dots and miniature boxcars.

  Step here, they say, just here. And a foot is lifted,

  a quick smile answers, This is enough, this striving—

  daylight as it is with its sudden rain,

  all the pockets of loose stones glistening.

  For the Sake of Retrieval

  As Whistler heard colors like a stretch of music—

  long harmonies, violet to amber, double hummings of

  silver, opal—so, in reverse, these three in their capsule,

  free falling two hours through the black Atlantic, ears

  popped, then filled with the music of Bach or Haydn,

  might fashion a landscape. Low notes bring

  a prairie perhaps, the sharps a smatter of flowers,

  as the pip notes of sonar spring back to the screen

  in little blossoms. They have come for the lost Titanic

  and find instead, in the splayed beam of a headlamp,

  silt fields, pale and singular, like the snow fields

  of Newfoundland. On its one runner blade the capsule slides,

  slips out through drift hummocks, through

  stones the Ice Age glaciers dropped, its trail

  the foot-thin trail of a dancer, who

  plants, glides, at his head the flurry

  of a ship’s chandelier, at his back a cinch-hook of icebergs

  cast down through the winds of Newfoundland.

  The music these three absorb

  stops with the wreckage, with words

  lipped up through a microphone:

  flange, windlass, capstan, hull plating, then oddly, syllables

  at a slant, as light might slant through window slats,

  stairsteps, doorknob, serving bowl, teacup, Bordeaux.

  Mechanical fingers, controlled by the strokes

  of a joy stick, brush over debris, lifting, replacing.

  In jittery strobe lights, camera lights, all colors

  ground down to a quiet palette,

  angles return, corners and spirals

  pull back to the human eye—as if from some

  iced and black-washed atmosphere, boiler coal,

  a footboard and platter, each common shape

  brightened, briefly held for the sake of retrieval.

  The current spins silt like a sudden storm.

  With the intricacy of a body the capsule adjusts,

  temperature, pressure. Someone coughs, then the three

  sit waiting, as in Whistler’s Sad Sea

  three are waiting. All around them are dollops

  of winter wind, everywhere beach and sea. No horizon

  at all in this painting, just a grey/brown thrum

  beach to sea. How steady his breath must have been

  on the canvas, his hands on the brushstrokes

  of lap robes, of bonnets and beach chairs, the pull

  of a red umbrella: each simple shape

  loved and awash in the landscape.

  April

  A little wind. One creak from a field crow.

  And the plow rips a shallow furrow, hobbles

  from guide-stake to guide-stake,

  draws its first contour line,

  and parallel, its next, next,

  then the turn-strips and deadfurrows, the headlands

  and buffer lines, until the earth from a crow’s vantage

  takes the pattern of a fingertip.

  And by noon the shadows are gridways: cut soil,

  the man on the plow, the plow and simple tail,

  each squat on a stretch of slender shade,

  black and grid-straight, like the line of anti-light

  a screen clicks up to, before its image

  swells, deepens. Dark glass

  going green, in the shade-darkened room

  of a laboratory—it casts a little blush

  across the face there, the shoulders and white pocket,

  then magnifies the moon-skin of a microbe, then deeper,

  electron molecules in a beam so stark it smolders.

  The man on the plow fears frost,

  its black cancer. The man at the screen

  fears the storm an atom renders

  on the lattice of a crysta
l. And heat. And the slick

  back-licks of vapor. With luck, with the patience

  the invisible nurtures, he will reshape

  frost-making microbes, snip frost-hook genes

  with a knife of enzymes. And at thirty degrees,

  twenty, through seam lines of snap beans, oranges,

  almonds, potatoes, no frost will form, no ratchet-bite

  of ice, all the buds of transformed microbes

  blossoming, reblossoming, like the first flowers.

  There is wind at the rim of the black-out shade.

  One tick of the focus gears. Another. On a glass plate,

  enlarged from nothing to filaments, the lines

  of DNA wander, parallel, in tandem,

  curled together past pigment blips, resin,

  as the contour lines for autumn oranges

  swerve in unison past boulder pods. The light

  through the mottled skins of genes

  is not light at all, but friction, caught and channeled,

  like pigment caught in the scratch-marks of caves.

  This was our world, the marks say: horse, maize,

  vast gods drawn down to a palm print.

  Drawn up from nothing the microbes gather,

  a little wind on the curtain,

  sun on the curtain’s faded side, on the crow and plow,

  on the earth sketched perfectly to receive it.

  Ringing

  This thimble one, with a lentil clapper.

  This one of shell.

  These top-notched ones, for the harnesses of horses.

  And these, for the fist-shaped, candle-spun

  carousels of children. This one of the pear-shape,

  this of the tulip, the fish mouth, the pomegranate,

  the beehive. This room-sized one, stung

  by four men in black braids, their arms

  underhanding a muted log, in unison,

  underhanding, casting the sanded log-tip

  to the lotus-etched sweet-spot of the bell,

  then again, underhanding in unison, like

  the casters of waterbuckets, the ring and the splay,

  and slowly, the child closes her book. A sound

  has begun, just out from the window. A tap-scratch,

  thwirr. Some rabbit, perhaps, trapped

  in a shallow snare, great hind feet

  plucking tufts from the crabgrass. She rises,

  sits back in her soft chair, rises. Perhaps she will

  witness a certain death, but the shelter of the book

  is memory now, the path to the window

  infinite, nothing, as she steps, stalls, steps, then

  slips shoulder first to the waxy pane—and there

  is her brother in the orchard below, casting stones

  with a sling through the dense, brittle leaves

  of the sugar maples. No targets at all there, no prey—

  his small head tipped and attentive—just the pull,

  release, then, long after, the answerings.

  Bird in Space: First Study

  Constantin Brancusi

  Nothing grows in the shadow of great trees …

  And yet, in a wine cask’s shadowy tube—oak aged

  and curved to a first-growth trunk—

  his legs inched up from his ankles.

  He was sixteen, alone. By a storefront window

  in Craiova, great breaths of chocolate

  sighing out from a churn stick

  held him. And the pattern of wheat dust

  on silos, the pattern of corn

  on a pulpy cob, like the grid marks in squid.

  Hunger. Its spidery grip. And then he was hired,

  dipped by the wrists into wine casks.

  Small, slender—the restaurant above him

  no more than a wind of garlic—he lathered, scrubbed,

  all the pips slipping out from the rough-hewn wood,

  all the bristle tips, esters,

  and the odors of yeast, wet wool, the wine sludge

  curved to the shape of his knees, his fingertips

  curved to the oak blebs: body and barrel

  in equal exchange—a melding, a kiss.

  Days passed. A year. Often at dusk

  he read cards at the restaurant tables, watched

  the wide Rumanian faces swell, withdraw.

  From the circle of Chariots, of Towers

  and delicate Hanged Men, a fear would begin,

  brushing up through each face like a wine flush.

  Enigmas. The queer burbles of candle wax.

  Then a cello spun out its long notes, binding,

  cupping them all to the known earth,

  as, morning by morning, the slats of an oak wine cask

  cupped his small body. Sometimes

  he sang there—cello songs, drawn down to the tempo

  of bristle tips, splinters. Sometimes he studied

  his hoop-slice of sky: looped from the ceiling, from

  strings like the rays of geometry, amber onions,

  three halved by the barrel rim’s sharp circumference,

  beets and beet tufts, and, weekly,

  the marbled hind legs of a roebuck.

  Globe shapes, light-polished, or cragged

  by a smatter of earth. Then weekly,

  arcing into his view from a fuller body,

  two thighs, two hocks, pulled tight at the hooves

  by a thread of rawhide: pale form in a fixed arc,

  like the memory of motion, like a bird stalled

  in the ice-winds of space, its stillness, flight.

  White Bears: Tolstoy at Astapovo

  The wheels of the train were a runner’s heartbeat—

  systole, diastole, the hiss-tic of stasis—

  as they flipped through the scrub trees and autumn grasses,

  slowing at last at the station lamps.

  And perhaps the fever had carried this memory,

  or the journey, or, just ahead in the darkness,

  the white, plump columns of lamplight.

  He is five, six, locked at the center

  of the evening’s first parlor game:

  Go stand in a corner, Lyova, until you stop thinking

  of a white bear. To his left,

  there is pipe smoke. Behind him

  a little laughter from the handkerchiefs.

  And in his mind, white fur

  like the blizzards of Tula! He studies the wall cloth

  of vernal grass and asters, a buff stocking, trouser cuff,

  but just at the rescue of a spinet bench

  two claws scratch back. A tooth. Then

  the lavender palate of polar bears.

  I cannot forget it, he whispers. And would not,

  through the decades that followed—

  the white, cumbersome shape

  swelling back, settling, at the rustling close

  of an orchard gate, or the close

  of a thousand pen-stroked pages,

  white bear, in the swirls of warm mare’s milk,

  at the side of the eye. White bear,

  when his listless, blustery, aristocratic life

  disentangled itself, landlord to

  shoemaker, on his back a tunic, in his lap

  a boot, white bear, just then,

  when his last, awl-steered, hammer-tapped peg

  bit the last quarter sole.

  In the gaps between curtains. And now,

  in the lamp-brightened gaps between fence slats,

  there and there, as if the bear

  were lurching at the train’s slow pace,

  and behind it—he was certain—the stifling life he fled

  rushing to meet him: family, servants, copyrights,

  just over the hill in the birch trees.

  Simplicity. He sighed. Dispossession.

  A monastery, perhaps. Kasha in oil. At eighty-two,

  his body erased to the leaf-scrape of sandal
s.

  And even the room near the station, the small bed

  with its white haunch of pillow,

  even the mattress, where he shivered

  with fever or a train’s slow crossing, and whispered,

  and, just before morning, died,

  was better. Deep autumn. Already the snows

  had begun in the foothills, erasing

  the furrows and scrub trunks, erasing at last

  the trees themselves, and the brooks,

  and the V-shaped canyons the brooks whittled.

  There and there, the landscape no more

  than an outreach of sky, a swelling, perhaps,

  where an orchard waited, then boundary posts, fence wire,

  then, below, the lavender grin of the clover.

  In the Beeyard

  Clover-rich, lugged close to the thorax and twirring heart,

  wax-capped, extracted, the viscid liquid

  is not gold at all, but the color of cellophane, ice.

  A little heat and its sugars may darken,

  emerge, as fingerprints rise through a dusting of talcum,

  but there in the dry-packed winter beehives

  it is clear, the complex nothing of air or water.

  And warm—although the orchard outside has slowly chilled,

  snow on the windbreak, deep snow on the hives

  in their black jackets. The honey is warm,

  and the hive walls, and the domes of bearded wheat straw

  tucked under tarpaper rooflines.

  To nurture this tropic climate, the bees

  have fashioned a plump wheel, clustered body to body

  on honey cells, chests clicking out a friction, a heat—

  faster, slower, in inverse proportion

  to the day’s chill—while the hives

  keep a stable ninety degrees, warm-blooded

  as the keepers who cross through the beeyard.

  They move with the high-steps of waders, a man,

  his daughter. He clears blown snow from the hive doors.

  She lowers her ear to the deep hummings.

  Like mummies, she thinks of the cloaked rows, like

  ghosts. Then salt pillars, headless horsemen

  turned white by some stark moonlight.

  In a flurry the images reach her,

  their speed almost frightening, splendid,

  as if the myths and fables of her life are a blizzard

  drawn suddenly to her, drawn suddenly visible

  through some brief interaction of

  temperature, light. And the day itself then

  swells a half-step closer: the sky and knotted

  peach trees, her father’s thick form

  smelling slightly of bacon. He turns

  and a bowed ear blooms, backlit a moment

  by the sudden sunlight, little veins and spiderings

  plum-colored, then fuchsia, as a warmth spreads

  over his face, her shoulders, over the windbreak