Flight: New and Selected Poems by Linda Bierds

vegetation that spreads
its spidered reach. He stands below, coat sharp,
boots sharp, his head dissolved to cloud.
It will support him soon, the green.

The Three Trees
    Late day. A wash of claret at the window.
And the room swells with the odor of quince,
tin-sharp and dank, as the acid creeps down
through the etch marks. He dips the foreground languidly,
Rembrandt, so thickets will darken, the horse
and lovers resting there, the bamboo latitude
of fishing pole, the shadowed river.
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    Then inks it all—mixed sky, three dappled trees—
and presses the intricate net of it
to the white-bleached etching sheet below: one skein
of storm aligning the nothingness, one haycart
rich with villagers. At the window now,
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    a fading to ochre. And beyond,
through the streets and valley, at the base
of a hillock thick with three trees, a hunter
is ringing a treble bell, its quick bite
driving the field birds to the sheltering grasses.
Around him, dark in their earth-colored clothes,
others are throwing a slack-weave net
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    out over the meadow and scuttering birds.
And up from their various hands, quick fires bloom,
rush through the beard grass, the birds bursting up
to the capturing net, some dying of fright,
some of flames, some snuffed by the hunters
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    like candles. A breeze begins, slips through the tree limbs.
Slung over each hunter are threadings of birds,
strung through the underbeak. Pleat-works of plenitude,
down the back, the curve of the shoulder.
They offer their warmth in slender lines,
as sunlight might, through the mismatched shutters
of a great room, the long gaps casting
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    their cross-hatch. As if time itself might spin them all
down some vast, irreversible pathway—
haycart, hunter, small bowl with its blossoms of quince—
and the simple patterns resting there
barred everything back from the spinning.

Altamira: What She Remembered
    That, chased by a covey of hunters, the fox
slipped into its den
exactly as bread slipped into her father’s mouth:
white with a tapering backstroke of brown.
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    That the hunters at the den door
chopped and chopped with their black heels.
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    That the cave they revealed, child-sized but
humid with promise, ticked
with a placid rain, as if the weather
of the sky were the weather of the earth.
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    That she saw on the cave walls, in blue-black
and ochre, “the bulls,” although they were bison,
she learned, and a dipping hind.
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    That the borders of her body were the borders
of the weather.
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    That whatever awakened within her there—
not grief, not fear—had the sound
of hooves down a cobbled street.
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    That they lifted her back by one arm.
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    That, as she walked with her father
through the downland, the sound of the hooves
settled.
    That whatever awakened within her there
had the sound of birds
flushed from the downland grasses.
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    Had the sound of leaves from a pitchfork’s tines.
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    Years later, had the ticking sound of the rain.

Six in All
    Two
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    â€œNow hold,” he said, his bloated word
afloat in the black-cloaked chamber.
And Mother stopped in profile. She had turned
to witness lifting moths, their thrum
across the oaks, then held to watch that tuft of air
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    that was the moths, empty yet filled
with tracks of the missing, like
the crease her cast-off headscarf left,
crown to milky ear. I stood outside the camera’s frame,
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    near tables fat with yellowed shirts and vats
of crystal vinegar. Beyond the oaks, a soldier
worked against a plow, leaned back across
its harness straps, as if to cancel cultivation,
as if to close the trough that foamed before him.
His uniform was stiffened wool, his shirt fresh blue
against the field: half farmer still, half infantry,
a slanted shape that branched between
two worlds of burial.
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    My mother swallowed, saw the shutter spiral down,
her face a blend of dust and wonder—
that she might gather over glass,