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

assume, like the flare a mollusk must feel, dropped
in the boiling soup. Then the stunned mouth,
all in one motion, closing and opening.
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    As I fell, I saw in the polished grain of the table
the static figure: roe.
    When I was insane, I earned my release
with a family of paintings. A circus. From memory.
Demanded from memory. As if the functioning mind
is one that imagines . There were gymnasts
and scarves. And once, on their sides
in a center ring, a woman and horse.
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    They lay facing each other like lovers, or
the twin lobes of the heart. At the sound of a whistle
each would roll over, roll away, the delicate
legs of the horse flailing a little, stroking the air,
the great body below gathering, shifting,
as a galaxy shifts in its black cabin.
Just before they turned over, each
to a separate world, there is a moment
captured in my painting, an instant,
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    when the shoe of the woman—its cloud of taffeta bow—
reaches out to the answering hoof of the horse.
Her foot—then, in the distance of
reflection, his: as if he, in some fashion,
were her magnificent extension,
and gave to her eyes what my cormorant saw,
as he entered himself in the passing waters.

Care: Emma Wedgwood Darwin, 1874
    With pen nib and glass, on a lozenge-sized leaf,
my husband has counted the two hundred thirty
plum-hued filaments of the sundew plant.
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    To his left, right, with equal attention,
our sons are sketching each shivering pedicel,
each sap-bloated gland. The coronal splay
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    of the filaments, their tendrils and curls,
the lateral braids of their journeys,
find echoes—just there on the side tables,
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    hearth board—in the rims of my father’s vases.
We have always visited the soil.
The ink, the marl of it. And made with each piece
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    a kind of cessation. A pause. Like the moments
one enters in late afternoon, a field perhaps,
or that shadowy climate just west of the door,
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    when the world’s noises suddenly stop—
no leaves, wind, no song birds. That hush,
that instant, before it all rushes on.
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    The cameo heads are the white of snow drifts.
And delicate, the bridge of a dowager’s nose
like a hairline quiver on the inner eye . . .
I remember one March my father,
on a fractured mantle of snow, dragged us
by horseback through the moorland fields, a rope
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    from the saddle to my cousin’s sleigh,
then backward to my brother’s, then backward
to mine. Steam bloomed from our various mouths.
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    And the brittle spindles of new broom, the star-nubs
of heather, the young fern, springing back
through the snow as each rider passed over,
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    offered the sound of rice paper folding—
or better, unfolding. Two hands releasing
the gift of it. Such concentration. Such care.

The Fish
    Tomorrow I look forward to a greater harvest.
    CHARLES DARWIN, 1832
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    Month after dry month, then suddenly
a brief rain has delivered to the fractured hillsides
a haze of grass. So sparse it might be
a figment of the heart. Yet its path
on the outstretched hand is true—brush and retreat—
like the breaths of a spaniel.
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    There are buried in the decks of certain ships
melon-sized prisms of glass, dangling their apices
to the cabins below. Through
their forked, pyramidic ziggings, daylight
is offered to the mess tables, to the tinware,
the gun-gray curlings of salt-tongue.
Not rainbowed at all, the light
approaches the face of each sailor
in segments, like the light in a spine of
train car windows. Then fuses, of course, when it
marries the retina, its chopped evolution
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    lost in the stasis of the visible.
We turn homeward soon. I remember
the seam lines of southern constellations, and the twin
tornadoes of a waterspout: one funnel
of wind reaching down from a cloud,
one funnel of sea reaching upward. They met
with the waist of an hourglass—in perfect reflection,
as we, through the Archer, the Scorpion, the Painter,
call forth from the evening