Flight: New and Selected Poems by Linda Bierds

the fan’s handle
a face is formed, spar by closing spar.
Egyptian, I think. The hooded eyes. The slender beard.
Each spar tucks down to its thin contribution,
earlobe or cheekbone, a slice of brow—
and there! one full-blown, ivory face, perfect
on her damask knees.
    Now the bats are aloft, stroking in pairs past the pallid moon.
Once, in the twilit dust of the X-ray room,
I saw on the screen a human lung,
abundant and veined as a willow.
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    In his bed the young man is stirring, and the woman
has lifted her parchment fan, the ivory face
shining a moment in the facets of lamplight
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    before its surrender to gray, yellow-green.
And which is the better, I wonder:
To gather from parts such a fullness?
Or to part into fullness so breathtakingly?

Pasteur on the Rue Vauquelin
    Near the red blade of a furred poinsettia,
just to the left of the stamen cluster, a dragonfly slowly
dips and lifts. In the grasp of its tendril legs
floats a yellow almond, or a child’s thimble perhaps, or
some bulbous facet of light. It is dawn. The boy,
Joseph Meister, is sleeping, his necklace
    Â 
    of cauterized dog bites
glowing like topaz. In delirium,
he mumbles of scarves and ale tents, how a jester
thumbs back a tankard’s lid, and then—
the snarl of a weasel in a woven cap.
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    This is the grand hour, light coming toward me
in fragments, as if to prepare me
for its greater flood. . . .
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    When I was a boy, floods toppled the fence posts
and birches. And once,
I watched at the depth of a shovel’s blade
yellow turnips afloat in a tepid sea. Their rocking
sent sets of concentric rings,
and there—three Saturns just under my feet!
    Â 
    Dawn. From my soft chair I am tempering rabies
with injections of . . . rabies! And tracking
the path of a yellow light, flower to memory to
a mirror of sky. How it dips and lifts
with its quick sting, synapse to synapse.
How that which invades us, sustains us.

The Highland
    Zelda Fitzgerald, 1939
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    Â 
    Dear One,
    Â 
    Do you have the time? Can you take
the time? Can you make
the time?
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    To visit me? The hospital doors have opened to spring,
and its land is high, dear one, each slope
with a vapor of crocuses. Its citizens, alas,
    Â 
    are low. Despondent, in fact, though a jar of sun tea
tans on the sill. The woman beside me
has opened the gift of a china doll, an antique
Frozen Charlotte. Glass face, a cap of china hair,
shellacked to the sheen of a chestnut.
    Â 
    At breakfast the shifting returned, dreadful
within me: colors were infinite, part of the air . . .
lines were free of the masses they held. The melon,
a cloud; and the melon, an empty,
oval lariat.
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    They have moved the canvas chair
from the window. Sun, enhanced
by the brewing jar, threw
an apricot scorch on the fabric. The fruit,
a cloud. The fruit,
a doll-sized, empty lariat.
    D. O., into what shape will our shapelessness flow?
    Dear One,
    Â 
    Italian escapes me. Still, I float to the operas
of Hasse and Handel, a word now and then
lifting through . . . sole, libertà . In an earlier time,
the thrum-plumped voice of a countertenor—half male,
half female—might place him
among us, we who are thickened
by fracturings. D. O., now and then, my words
    Â 
    break free of the masses they hold.
Think of wind, how it barks through the reeds
of a dog’s throat. How the pungent, meaty stream of it
cracks into something like words—but not. I just sit
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    in the sun room then, slumped in my fur and slabber,
feeling the wolf begin, back away, then some
great-jawed, prehistoric other
begin, back away, then the gill-less,
the gilled, then the first pulsed flecks
begin, back away, until only a wind remains,
vast and seamless. No earth, no heavens.
No rise, no dip. No single flash of syllable
that might be me. Or you.
    D. O.,
    Now a gauze of snow on the crocuses! I woke
to its first brilliance—midnight, great moon—
and walked through the hallways. The pin-shaped