Flight: New and Selected Poems by Linda Bierds Page B

called out
to each other, their spines at the spines
of the long horses, and the flaps of muscle
thick shawls around them. Then they rose, as a thaw
cut a path to the living.
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    . . . A flutter, yellow, where an insect heart ripples
in reflex. But no, it is only light and shadow, light
turning shadow. As the perfect doors, in their terrible
finitude, open and open.
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    He straightens, feels his body swell
to the known room. Such vertical journeys, he thinks,
down, then back through the magnifications
of light. And the soldiers, their cloaks
like blossoms on a backdrop of snow:
surely, having taken through those hours
both the cradle and the grave,
they could enter any arms and sleep.

Six in All
    Three
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    That we could block these warring worlds—the native
from the fashioned—would make my mother flinch,
although she dips against the larch with languid
resolution, Jane in fever at her feet, my father
with his pipe bowl lifted, pinched,
as he might gently pinch
some brier sparrow into flight . . . that
on this greenhouse wall our faded wisps of family,
reduced to amber filaments, could keep
the cool and hot apart . . .
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    At times when stark daylight recedes, my present face,
in pale reflection, bobs
near its childhood other—while under the dappled
layers of us, the slack-jawed orchids steam.
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    Two worlds. Or one, perhaps. Two rival
atmospheres. Once my father crept beneath the sea,
along some vein of miner’s shaft. He told
how shaft heat sucked and swelled,
how pallid torsos of the men
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    gleamed like pulpit lilies. The icy sea so close above
a pin might bring it down, he said.
Two dozen fathoms rushing by. Just overhead,
he heard the boulders shift and roll,
like great-boots pacing on his grave.
    He tossed the brier bird—launched it into flame,
at least—then stepped into the war. Can you believe,
he wrote to us, a field of corn for camouflage?
The frightened soldiers, just stalks themselves
in cultivated blue, dipped and hid, or so they thought—
their crouching image everywhere, like evening
through some giant harp. The corncobs burst
and rained about them, the brindled, bullet-blasted
leaves. On one dead man, the kernels’ milk
had glued thick corn-silk to his throat.
It swayed a bit in the August breeze, from
breastbone toward his shoulderline.
As I have seen some bloodless moss
sway from hothouse trees.

Shawl: Dorothy Wordsworth at Eighty
    Any strong emotion tempers my madnesses.
The death of beloveds. William in his fever-coat.
I reenter the world through a shallow door
and linger within it, conversations returning,
the lateral cycle of days.
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    I do not know what it is that removes me,
or sets me again at our long table, two crescents
of pike on a dark plate. But memory lives then,
and clarity. Near my back once again,
our room with a brook at the baseworks,
its stasis of butter and cheese. Or there,
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    in a corner, my shawl of wayside flowers.
Orchis and chicory. Little tongues of birth-wort.
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    I remember a cluster of autumn pike
and a dark angler on the slope of the weir.
The fish in his hand and the roiling water
brought forth with their brightness
his leggings and waist. But his torso was lost
into shadow, and only his pipe smoke survived,
lifting, then doubling, on the placid water above him.
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    Often, I think, I encompass a similar shadow.
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    But rise through it, as our looped initials
once rose over dye-stained eggs.
We were children. With the milk of a burning candle
we stroked our letters to the hollowed shells.
And dipped them, then, in a blackberry bath,
until the script of us surfaced,
pale, independent, the D and cantering W.
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    Then C for Christopher. V —William laughed—for vale.
And P, he said, for Pisces, Polaris, the gimballing
planets. And for plenitude, perhaps,
each season, each voice in its furrow of air . . .
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    Once, I was told of a sharp-shinned hawk
who