Flight: New and Selected Poems by Linda Bierds Read Free Book Online

bay, across the pedestal of the rain,
the spawning salmon—steelhead, chinook—having
lost the borders of the river, shuddered and leapt,
thrust in through the mustard fields, through rooftops
and the pivoting sentries of weathercocks, their fins,
the long seams of their bellies stretching, dipping—seeking
one thick current to resist.

Seizure
    When his eyes took the half-sheened stillness of fish roe,
he tightened his helmet, cinched its inner cap of
canvas straps until the dome above wobbled, swayed
with a life of its own. We were not to touch him,
he said, but wait on the sidewalk until his soul returned.
His hat had a decal that captured light
or hissed out a glow when the light diminished. We were
not to touch him, but watch the ballet of his arcing arm
as he opened the fish, the chum and ponderous king,
flushing the hearts, the acorns of spleen. We were young
together, fourteen or fifteen, and still he returned
to the fish houses, his sharp hands working the knives,
disappearing in flaps of cream-tipped flesh that
closed like a shawl. He showed us the opaque archings
of ribs, brought into our schoolroom the weightless gills,
book-pressed and dried, the spine he had saved that
snapped apart into tiny goblets. We saw him one night
fallen by the river—saw the light from his helmet,
that is, lurching in the long grasses, slicing its
terrible path like a moth grown fat and luminous:
if what flashed there could be seen as a body,
could be stopped in the human hand.

The Skater: 1775, Susannah Wedgwood at Ten
    He would come, Darwin, in a yellow-wheeled chaise,
past the mine shafts and whim gins, the bottle kilns,
past the patchwork of geese on the carriageway,
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    and counsel her father on the treatment of gums,
of eyelids, or the maddening rasp
in the knee, his long physician’s bulk
trembling the floorboards as he walked.
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    She would stand by his chair
to study his face, his skin with its smallpox scars—
each cupping, she felt, a grain of the finest pepper—
how his chin pulled back as he stammered
his verses: the t’s and c’s, the shivering n’s:
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    From Nature’s coffins to her cradles turn . . .
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    how his fingers resolved into slender tips,
tapered like formal candles.
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    He brought to her once
two sheep-jaw skates, fearsome and splendid
in their muslin pouch, the teeth in brackets
on the leather boot soles, each jawbone below
filed to a blade. And walked with her then
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    to the winter pond, the white shrubs
with their blossoms of crows. The teeth were chewed
to a biscuit brown, with streaks of white
where the grasses ran. And the grinding fissures,
spidered like glass, chafed her a bit
when she touched them. Hang o’er the gliding steel,
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    he recited, and hiss upon the ice . . .
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    his words a series of quick clouds
as she circled before him, gliding in fact
on bone, not steel, with the sound of her strokes
less a hiss than a breathing, as if
the lost world resurfaced there.
Dark girl, pushing off with each high-laced boot.
Then the teeth, then the bone, then the mirroring ice.

Lautrec
    Often I fished with my cormorant, Tom,
who would, through wing dips and shudders, identify
the schools. I remember the knots
on his tepid legs, where skin rippled up from the bone,
and the parallel pickets of his shoulders—
how their pivots found echoes
in my knuckles, when I plucked from the sleeve
a granule of ash.
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    The figure is all, and the figure in motion.
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    When I opened the fish there were glimmers of
roe, which in turn I turned over
in my study of English: to the deer,
and some dark blemish in mahogany,
in the spill of its quartersawed grain.
How wind through the lips can create such a trio:
fish egg, and doe, and a dapple in wood!
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    From birth,
my legs held the pliancy of glass.
And shattered, finally, reducing my life to a hobble.
As a boy, rising up from the low chair, I felt
a shin bone buckle and split—a pain,
I