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

words in all. And so she thought
in reds and whites, in hard-spun
roundnesses. One afternoon,
my father pressed her fingers to his pipe, breathed in,
exhaled, breathed in, that she might feel, like
some enchanted heart, the pipe bowl flare and ebb.
From that time on, she tracked its brier flutterings,
    Â 
    and all the spheres about her: the rigid arc
of radishes, the nurse’s knees
that rose and sank beneath her white-knit stockings
like tandem bellies of dying fish.
    Â 
    On the pane beside my sister’s face,
the glass-plate negative reveals a soldier
dead for weeks, or starved before his death,
his belly just a sunken sling between the bracket
of his hips. Above it all his stiffened belt
orbits like a jester’s hoop. The hoop and then a gap
of air, and then the bones of him. And
    Â 
    to the right, in sawgrass and a twining vetch,
his cup and round canteen.
    â€œDeath’s thimbles,” Father called the cups,
the way they steered to softer cloth
a bullet’s leaded point. Invisibly the soldiers ran,
until the moonlight caught the cups, until
each pockmarked curve of tin
flared its dimpled bull’s-eye.
    Â 
    And so we die of glimmer after all.
    Â 
    Jane’s nurse was kind, but by her presence
verified the death at hand. We longed each night
to watch her lift her cape, drape its hood across
her hair, step into the field. The night absorbed her
instantly, the open, blue-black flapping cape
no more than tree limb, shrubbery. Departing,
she was just the world, the way the world
recedes at night. Then at the ridge
she turned to wave
and flashed her ghastly whiteness back at us.

Edison: 1910
    Dressed in an ebony suit,
could the soul of William James, they asked me, slip
past the bakery counter, his slack lapels
dusty with flour? Or walk on the cobbles
in those soft shoes? It was God, of course,
not James they questioned. And No, I said, No
suit, no Deity. We are the finite, meat-mechanisms
    Â 
    of matter. The uproar then! He was seen—dark shoes,
trousers—all the newsprint dripping with sightings!
Look down to your own shoes, I told them. There,
in the fluoroscope’s green wash, your Inmost Essence
    Â 
    flexes. I remember Dally in his white coat,
week after week, bent
to the X-ray’s beam, to the bloat
of ghostly photos, as the peephole burned its round tattoo
on his brow and cheekbone. How the beam itself
nibbled him—fingers, toes, hair, spleen.
    Â 
    A lantern through dust, he whispered, is a kind of gill.
It was Wednesday, a week from his death, some
childhood dust storm storming again.
He spoke of its wind and the launched soil,
the anemone-sway of the darkened sheep, as slowly,
heads dropped, they crossed, recrossed
the smallest arc of battered turf.
And lamplight in the barn,
    Â 
    although it was midday. And although it was midday
the sunset began. Crimson, he said,
    just over the sheep, just over the alders, the yellow
sweep of hedgerow. And false, of course, some light
at play on the facets of dust. But . . . wonderful,
    Â 
    he told me. His bones on the fluoroscope’s pale screen
tapered and flared, the nodules of toe-tips
black, protrusive, like ghastly buds—a presence
    Â 
    that walks with us always, I think, flexing its grip
invisibly. And that visible sunset he fashioned,
slumped on its false horizon?
Some vibrant, wind-churned absence,
defined by dust and reverence.

Muybridge
    These are the names of the horses:
Occident. Elaine. Abe Edgerton. Clay.
With a shutter’s quick clickings, I stopped them,
then dealt the divine and its opposite, picture
by square picture: the unwinged body in flight—
two hooves pushing off, then one, then none—
and the pact of that flight: groping forelegs,
the horn-sheathed toes thrust out like cane tips.
    Â 
    Time after time, from the beauty of motion
came the pickets of stasis! And yet,
    Â 
    I remember the heart of a snapping turtle,
grotesque in its florid