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

two-step. We had peeled back
the breastplate, dragged the body by cart past the eyes
of twelve cameras, the cart wheels tripping the shutters.
I could not watch the motion then, but
turned instead to the open mouth, the palate ridged
like a walnut shell, turned instead to the static photos—
where something, hollow and weightless, a poppy perhaps,
where something twelve times, like a poppy,
was pressed and released by a rhythmic wind.
    Â 
    I stopped the pine snake and horse. Or better,
I held them. Field cat. Hawk. The wake
of a coastline steamer.
    Â 
    In a northwest harbor one autumn, I watched a meadow
flood to a cranberry pond. Then a man with a rake
pulled the blunt berries from their soft vines.
They floated around him, filling the surface,
    red and amber and that last yellow before it is red.
He stood in the pond, and the berries, like evening,
absorbed him, his boots and thighs. They covered each
glisten of the water, until only the sharpest shining
survived, where the rake cut a path through the redness.
    Â 
    What would I hold? All. Almost all. The poppy
in its soft backdrop. The hawk. And the horse,
the great weight on the last hoof,
then the lifting of that weight.
What would I stop? Only the path
of the rake, I think, that arc
reaching over the pond and the circling hour.
Only the need to reach over.

Six in All
    Five
    Â 
    Â 
    Along the foreground’s dusty scrub, a cello’s ice-white shadow
slinked toward my mother’s hem. Beyond the frame,
the army band was mute across the ground: one flute,
then thwirrs of shuffling cards, like pigeon wings.
    Â 
    And to the left the birds themselves,
the homing cotes and landing boards.
    Â 
    My parents posed against an oak, Jane’s carriage thick
beside them—no Jane at all, except for fists
that groped above the basket rim like pearly mums.
My mother smiled, leaned back across my father’s arm.
A soldier coughed. No war in sight, no long descent
from dampened bone, to human grain, to
just some frontal profile in the earth. And so,
    Â 
    when from the trees the little shape began,
arced toward us like some triggered stone, we held
our leisure. The bird stoked down, the burl of message
on its leg just words—although I think their secret
finished us. In time, hawk-ripped or ripped by shot,
    Â 
    still the pigeons stuttered back. I wondered
at their steadfastness. The jerking head, the shad-roe eye—
they seemed to crack through clouds
like energy and nothing more. Not drawn by words, of course,
but . . . what? The mate? The suet bead? The humid cote
or human hand? The chime of some vestigial song?
I cannot find the words for this. I think
    of oaks, a shutter’s gape, the field drums
curved like calves across the ground.

Burning the Fields

1.
    In the windless late sunlight of August,
my father set fire to a globe of twine. At his back,
the harvested acres of bluegrass and timothy
rippled. I watched from a shallow hill
as the globe, chained to the flank of his pickup truck,
galloped and bucked down a yellow row, arced
at the fire trench, circled back,
arced again, the flames behind
sketching first a C, then closing to O —a word
or wreath, a flapping, slack-based heart,
    Â 
    gradually filling. To me at least. To the mare
beside me, my father dragged a gleaming fence,
some cinch-corral she might have known,
the way the walls moved rhythmically,
in and in. And to the crows, manic
on the thermals? A crescent of their planet,
    Â 
    gone to sudden sun. I watched one stutter
past the fence line, then settle
on a Hereford’s tufted nape,
as if to peck some safer grain, as if
the red-cast back it rode
contained no transformations.

2.
    A seepage, then, from the fire’s edge: there
and there, the russet flood of rabbits.
    Over the sounds of burning, their haunted calls
began, shrill and wavering, as if
their dormant voice strings
had tightened into threads of glass.
    Â 
    In an instant they were