Flight: New and Selected Poems by Linda Bierds Page B

Noonan tipped the octant
toward the stars, and then, no radios
to guide them, toward the dawn and rising sun.
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    On the hot, New Guinea runway, they’d lifted glasses,
a scorch of mango juice brilliant in their hands.
Around their heels, a dog-sized palm leaf fretted,
then the cockpit’s humid air slowly chilled to atmosphere
and there was nothing: two thousand miles
of open sea, theory, friction, velocity. The weighted if s,
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    the hair-thin, calibrated when s. Reason says they died
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    from time and deviation. That vision can’t be trusted:
the octant’s sightline, quivered by an eyelash,
the compass needle, vised by dust, sunlight’s runway
on the water, even the slack-weave net of longitude
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    cast to gather time and space, a few salt stars,
the mackerel sky. The folly of its dateline
throws travelers into yesterday, and so the snub-nose plane
quickly crossed into the past, and stalled, and sank,
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    the theories say, one hour before departure.
    Reason asks for grace with time, a little latitude
that lets a dateline shiver at the intervals of loss
and gain. As vision does, within
those intervals—and though it can’t be trusted, still
it circles back, time and time again:
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    the black Pacific closing over them. And then,
the click of glasses, orange and radiant.

Grand Forks: 1997
    An arc of pips across a playboard’s field
tightens, then, in the Chinese game of Go,
curls back to weave a noose, a circle closing, closed.
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    Surrounded, one surrenders. Blindsided,
collared from behind. Then silence, or so
my friends revealed, the arc across their patchwork fields
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    not pips, but flood. The dikes collapsed, they said;
the river, daily, swelled. Then pastures rose,
as earth’s dark water table—brimful—spilled, and closed
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    behind their backs, the chaff-filled water red
with silt, with coulees, creeks, a russet snow,
all merging from behind. Then through the bay-bright fields
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    a dorsal silence came. And, turning, filled
the sunken streets, the fallen dikes, the slow,
ice-gripped periphery where frozen cattle closed
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    across their frozen likenesses. Mirrored,
as when the Northern Lights began, their glow
was mirrored, green to green, across the flooded fields—
like haunted arcs of spring, one circle closing, closed.

The Circus Riders
    Marc Chagall, 1969
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    Sly-eyed and weightless, my violet rooster
quietly crosses a tent’s blue dome.
He is buoyant, inverted, a migrating, wattled chandelier
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    that blinks from a ceiling’s cool expanse
as the astronauts do—now one, now two, now three—
in orbit past a camera lens. While I dapple his beak
with a palette knife—and the acrobat’s tights,
and the gallery’s blue curve—the astronauts
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    crackle from space, their silver suits
shining like herring brine. They tell me the stars,
ungrated by atmosphere, do not twinkle at all, but
glow in their slow orbs, like shells on a black beach.
Now and then, through a tiny, waste-water door,
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    a galaxy of urine rolls, each oval drop bloated,
indistinguishable, they say, from the stars.
And the sextant quivers through this human heaven!
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    On a sky of henna and cypress green,
a purple moon lingers. I placed to its left
a grandfather clock, massive, floating up
from a village’s peaked roofs, then tilting to gravity’s arc.
With its walls and weightless precision, my clock
■ ■ ■
    seems a spacecraft’s twin, a few seconds—
lacquered to history—pressed to the crystal
like faces. When I was ten, the Russian woods held a haze
of white birches. Specters, I thought, that sidestroked
at night past my open window, their leafy hoods
rattling. And now they are back,
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    waving from space, humming Dvořák’s minor keys—
the plaintive A’s, the pensive E’s—their world
a little bead of sound
in that vast, unbroken soundlessness. A