Flight: New and Selected Poems by Linda Bierds Page A

that she might claim,
across the flecks of bromide salt, some bygone self.
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    The sunlight cast quick glints against the plow,
across the rippling skins of vinegar.
My mother laughed, stepped forward
    through the grass. Once she penned a note in vinegar’s ink—
invisible, but for blisters wetness leaves. Like magic,
she said, how heat will mark each letter’s path. Some greeting,
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    I think, her words so short-lived their birth
was withdrawal. We held the page to a candle’s flame
and letters stroked up on mottled wings.
Then “Look,” she whispered, “their quickening shapes:
the thumb-plump, the sickled,
the branching-away . . . ”

The Geographer
    from the painting by Vermeer
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    There. Out the window. They are burning the flood fields.
And the light that touches his forehead
is softened by smoke. He is stopped in a long robe,
blue with a facing of pumpkin. In his hand,
the splayed legs of a compass taper to pin tips.
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    It is noon. Just after dawn, he took
for his errant heart a paper of powdered rhubarb
and stoops to the window now, half in pain, half
in love with the hissing fields:
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    mile after mile of cane stalks, fattened
with drawn water. Such a deft pirouette, he thinks,
flood pulled up through the bodies of cane, then
water cane burned into steam, and steam like mist
on the fresh fields, sucked dry for the spring planting.
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    Powdered rhubarb. Like talc on the tongue.
And what of this heart, this blood? Harvey writes
that the washes of pulse do not ebb, do not
flow like the sea, but circle, draw up to the plump heart.
And is that the centering spirit then? Red plum,
red shuffling mole? . . .
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    When the flood waters crested, the dark coffins
bobbed down through the cane stalks like blunt pirogues.
And then in the drift, one slipper
and the ferreting snouts of radishes.
    He touches his sleeve, looks down to his small desk,
pale in its blanket of map, all the hillsides
and carriageways, all the sunken stone walls
reduced to the sweep of a pin tip.
They are burning the flood fields—such a hissing, hissing,
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    like a landscape of toads. And is that how blood
circles back in its journey, like water through
the body of the world? And the great, flapping fire, then—
opening, withering—in its single posture
both swelling and fading—is that the human heart?

Van Leeuwenhoek: 1675
    All day, the cooper’s hoops squeal and nibble.
Through the single eyepiece of his hand-ground lens,
he watches a spider’s spinnerets, then the tail-strokes
of spermatozoa. Now and then, his bald eye unsquints,
skates blindly across his wrist and sleeve—
and makes from his worlds their reversals:
that of the visible and that of the seen . . .
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    Visible? he is asked, at the market, or the stone tables
by the river. The lip of the cochineal? Starch
on the membranes of rice? But of course—
though a fashioned glass must press and circle,
tap down, tap down, until that which is, is.
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    Until that which is, breaks to the eye.
It is much like the purslane, he tells them,
that burst from the hoofbeats of horse soldiers:
black seeds long trapped in their casings, until
the galloping cracked them. In the steppes, he says,
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    or veldt, where nothing in decades had traveled.
Then flowers burst forth from the trauma
of hoof-taps, and left in the wake of the soldiers
a ribbon of roadway as wide as their riding.
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    Smoke now. The screech of a shrinking hoop.
His thoughts are floral with hearth flames and soldiers,
the cords in his bent neck rigid as willow.
Then slowly, below, something yellow begins. Some flutter of
yellow on the glass plate, in the chamber of a tubal heart . . .
    By winter, the snows crossed over the flanks
of the horses, felling them slowly. And the soldiers,
retreating, so close to survival, crept
into the flaccid bellies. Two nights,
or three, hillocks of entrails steaming like
breath. Now and then they