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

some
celestial repetition of our shared churnings.
    Â 
    We shattered the spout
with shotguns that kicked like the guns of my childhood
when leaves were a prune-mulch and my sisters
stood at the rim of the orchard.
Katty. Caroline. Susan. Marianne.
In the temperate wind, their dresses and sashes,
the variegated strands of their hair, were
the nothing of woodsmoke. Steam.
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    I cannot foretell our conclusion.
    Â 
    But once, through a pleat-work of waves,
I watched as a cormorant caught and released
a single fish. Eight times. Trapped and released.
Diving into an absence, the fish
re-entered my vision in segments, arcing
through the pivot of the bird’s beak. Magnificent,
I thought, each singular visit, each
chattering half-step from the sea.

FROM The Profile Makers (1997)

Six in All
    Preface
    Â 
    Â 
    Across the buckled, suck-hole roads,
my cousin, Mathew Brady’s aide, bobbed
toward our scattered camp, his black-robed,
darkroom “whatsit wagon”—its pling
of glass plate negatives—half hearse, half cloaked
calliope. The Civil War was undeveloped
and camp was thick with families, the fields
a hail of slumping tents, their canvas cupping
counterpanes, quilts with hubs of rising sun.
    Â 
    He posed us near our tent’s propped flap,
Father, Mother, my toddler sister cupped over
my hip, then waved us to a sudden freeze—
except for Jane, whose squirms became a handkerchief
or dove wing on the ether plate. He took
my father, stiff against the summer larch,
then Mother’s ragged silhouette—the two of them,
and us again, and Jane asleep. Six in all,
my family and a chronicle of passing light,
the day by half-steps slipping down
across our hair and collarlines.
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    In later years, the war long cold, he found
in surplus its brittle song: long rooms
of glass plate negatives, with lesser ones,
he told me—the sunken corpse, the sunken soldier
sipping tea—revived as greenhouse windows.
The houses are magnificent, glass rows of amber
apparitions, that disappear, he said, when rains
begin. That melt, for human eyes at least, into
a kind of nothingness. Then only metal frames
are seen, square by empty square,
like netting on the land.
    Â 
    I would find our family, he said, across
one building’s southern wall,
where tandem trunks of windblown oak
arc toward hothouse limes . . .

Six in All
    One
    Â 
    Â 
    From balsa’s weightless wood my father carved
the horse, then smoothed it to a foal,
then further still, into a kind of moon—horse yet,
and yet the head in soft relief was lunar, undefined—
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    as his is now, within the greenhouse wall. Erased
by my cousin’s breath, perhaps, upon the plate, across
the damp collodion—his sigh or hum, some humanness
that hovers still, between my father’s collarline
and globes of hothouse limes.
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    Two years beyond this negative, my father drowned
off Georgia’s shore—so twice was slain by breathing.
They say on death the lungs accept the sea, inhale
its foreign element, the way I think the shutter’s mouth
draws time inside to timelessness.
    Â 
    Before he died, he wrote that flocks of braying mares
were dropped by sling from battleships to waiting scows,
their stiffened legs like canes, he said,
the flashing cane-tips of their hooves.
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    â€œFor those of us on wet-decked scows, a dozen times
they broke the sun, a dozen dust-caked underbreasts
cast their quick eclipse . . . ”
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    And did I recall our balsa foal? From rye and fern,
from loops of waxy thread, how we wove her green arena?
“God, to have that footing now!—turf instead of
sickly sea, that swings me like some sling-strung beast.”
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    Within the plate glass negative, he waits
near summer larch: boots sharp, coat sharp, but face
dissolved to white. Across the plate’s transparent sky,
the hothouse air has spawned an emerald scum,
a silken