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

pursued the reflection of its fleeing prey
through three striations of greenhouse glass:
the arrow of its body cracking first into anteroom,
then desert, then the thick mist
of the fuchsias. It lay in a bloodshawl
of ruby flowers, while the petals of glass
on the brick-work floor repeated its image.
Again and again and again.
As all we have passed through sustains us.

The Suicide of Clover Adams: 1885
    All the bodies like fallen cattle.
And the snub-brimmed caps. The war. Civil.
Brady’s shadow, at times, rinses a photograph
with its black pond. But the image I keep
    Â 
    is a blasted meadow. Burdock, bloated sacs
of lungwort. And up from the earth’s fresh trough,
I think, the mineral scent of ripped grasses.
    Â 
    Henry slumps in the grip of a toothache.
    Â 
    If I were real, I would help him. But I
am the fabric of well-water—slick and transparent—
my voice a bird where my shoulder should be.
    Â 
    In the Doctrine of Signatures, each plant
cures the body it mimics.
So the liver-shaped leaves of hepatica
temper the liver’s jaundice, and snuff
from the snapdragon’s tapered neckline
heals the tubular body of the human throat.
    Â 
    Heart leaf and toothwort.
    Â 
    Steam from the kettle
has cast a late dew on the ladles.
And a privacy to each of the windows.
In print after print, Brady centered the men
facing east. The sandbags and cannons.
One midday, I centered our cousins with an eastward
glance, fresh for the incoming hour.
    In the darkroom musk, they
rose through potassium baths
with the languorous ripples of flounders . . .
    Â 
    Steam. Its simmering mist.
If I were real, I would offer a flower. But I
    Â 
    have taken a body of water, stirred
through with cyanide salts. Slick and transparent,
they stroke their signature to the echoing self.
Which is nothing. And from which
nothing rises at all.

Vespertilio
    Julia Margaret Cameron
    Â 
    Â 
    Like winter fog, the coal dust climbs her stockings,
although the coal itself has long departed, tumbled
barrow by barrow to an alternate shelter.
She scrubs the floor, sets across the gaping boards
square vats of rank collodion, of alcohol
and pyrogallol. Still the coal dust blooms,
until her apron darkens and her hem-strokes
brush to the path’s pale stones
    Â 
    a soft hieroglyphics. She has walked
to the glass henhouse and bundles the hens
to their new roost, one wing at her breast, one wing
in her hand, the stiff legs riding her forearm.
Their livingness, she says, touching
a wattle and ruby comb, the tepid feet that stretch,
then curl, like something from the sea.
    Â 
    So the coalshed becomes her darkroom
and the henhouse welcomes the bent Carlyle,
Darwin and Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow,
each posed near a curtained backdrop, each
    Â 
    sharp in his livingness: a glaze of amber earwax,
a leaf of tobacco like ash on the beard.
But the portraits . . . Unfocused, critics say. The lens
stepping down into fog. Aberrant. Distorted. Although
she prefers Undefined, as in Not yet captured
    by the language of this world. They are rich
with the inner, she answers, with a glimpse of the soul
flapping up through collodion baths,
    Â 
    darkly transparent, like the great bats
that flap near the henhouse windows. She watches them
break at dusk past the tree line
then flash at the windows and flash, as if
they are seeking their lost counterparts—although
they are not birds, of course, but dense with wings,
so dense the sleek, half-opened wings
    Â 
    would cover a wattle, a comb, and opening, easily
cover the back, the breast,
and easily opening cover the tail,
the yellow, tepid, stretching feet: like
a dark sea spreads over its garden.

Six in All
    Four
    Â 
    Â 
    The pulpit lilies gaped and dipped. The coffin’s velvet
cast its nap in variative strips, as wind
might cast a summer’s wheat. Asleep, they said,
she looks asleep—if sleep can suck the cheek skin down,
can still the lids to bone. I think
    Â 
    she had six