Flight: New and Selected Poems by Linda Bierds Page A

leaves
of the potted cosmos threw a netted shadow,
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    and I stopped in its fragile harmony,
my arms, bare feet, the folds of my limp gown
striped by such weightless symmetry
I might have been
myself again. Through an open screen door
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    I saw a patient, drawn out by the brightness perhaps,
her naked body a ghastly white, her face
a ghastly, frozen white, fixed
in a bow-mouthed syncope, like something
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    out of time. As we are, D. O., here
in the Highland, time’s infinite, cyclic now-and-then
one simple flake of consciousness
against the heated tongue.
    Dear One,
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    My Italian improves:
sole, libertà,
and Dio, of course, D. O.! (Although He
has forsaken me.) The tea at the window
gleams like the flank of a chestnut horse. It darkens
imperceptibly, as madness does, or dusk.
All morning, I held a length of cotton twine—
a shaggy, oakum filament—
between the jar and brewing sun.
We made a budding universe: the solar disc,
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    the glassy globe of reddish sea, the stillness
in the firmament. At last across the cotton twine
a smoke began, a little ashless burn, Dio,
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    that flared and died so suddenly
its light has yet to reach me.

Concentration
    We understand the egg-sized ship,
the thread-and-spindle masts, the parchment sails
puffed to a rigid billow.
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    And the lightbulb that enfolds it.
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    We understand the man, Graham Leach, his passion for
impossibles. We see him,
tucked within the vapor of his jasmine tea,
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    while heron-toed forceps slowly wed
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    a deckhand to a tear of glue.
The rudder would lodge in the bulb’s slim throat
but could be folded, slipped inside, reopened
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    into seamlessness. We understand that sleight of hand
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    but not this full-sized pocket watch
upright in a 30-watt. Perhaps it’s made of lesser stuff
than gold, some nonmetallic pliancy. Still,
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    it mirrors the museum shelf, and to the left
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    the plump barque, static in its perfect globe.
Perhaps he blew a gaping bulb
then tucked the watch inside, rewarmed the glass,
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    drew out a path, clamped one end’s concentric rings,
the contact point’s dark star. This would explain
what we’ve attributed to time
and now must give to fire: the amber face,
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    the wrinkled Roman numerals—
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    still fixed, still spaced to mark the intervals
of space, but rippled,
a dozen, ashless filaments. The filament
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    itself is gone. Gold’s light enough, perhaps.
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    We understand, to make a living bulb,
three hundred wicks were tried. Before a match was found.
Oakum, fishline, flax, plumbago. A coconut’s
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    starched hair. A sprig of human beard.
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    Three hundred tries, before some agent, tucked
within a vacuum globe, could catch the rasp
outside—that friction-fed, pervasive tick—
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    and channel it, and draw it in.

Orbit
    For warmth in that Swedish winter, the child,
aged one, wore petticoats hooked from angora,
knotted and looped to a star-shaped weave.
And for her father, there at the well lip,
she did seem to float in the first magnitude—
alive and upright, far down the cylindric dark,
with the star of her petticoats
buoyantly rayed on the black water.
One foot in the water bucket, one foot
glissading a brickwork of algae, he stair-stepped
down, calling a bit to her ceaseless cries, while
his weight, for neighbors working the tandem crank,
appeared, disappeared, like a pulse.
In bottom silt, the mottled snails
pulled back in their casings
as her brown-shoed legs lifted, the image
for them ancient, limed with departure:
just a shimmer of tentacles
as the skirt of a mantle collapsed
and a shape thrust off toward answering shapes,
there, and then not, above.

Latitude
    With a framework of charts and reckonings, reason tells us
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    they died from time, the rhythmic tick of hub and blade
that, turning, turned their fuel to mist.
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    And reason says, while Earhart held the plane
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    balanced as a juggler’s plate,