Flight: New and Selected Poems

First Hand
(2005)
The Seconds
(2001)
The Profile Makers
(1997)
The Ghost Trio
(1994)
Heart and Perimeter
(1991)
The Stillness, the Dancing
(1988)
Flights of the Harvest-Mare
(1985)

A MARIAN WOOD BOOK

Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons
Publishers Since 1838
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Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bierds, Linda.
Flight: new and selected poems: Linda Bierds.
p. cm.
“A Marian Wood book.”

eISBN : 978-1-440-64197-8

I. Title.
PS3552.1357A
811'.54âdc22

http://us.penguingroup.com

For Marian Wood, all

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Ahsahta Press for allowing me to reprint these poems from
Flights of the Harvest-Mare:
“Lesson: The Spider's Eighth Eye,” “Mid-Plains Tornado,” “Mirror,” “Tongue,” and “Zuni Potter: Drawing the Heartline.”

My thanks as well to The Rockefeller Foundation for a month-long residency in Bellagio, Italy, during which much of this book was shaped, and to the editors of journals in which a number of new poems first appeared:

Alhambra Poetry Calendar (2008): “Navigation”;
The Atlantic Monthly:
“Sketchbook”;
Bellingham Review:
“Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice”;
Blackbird.com
:
“Meriwether and the Magpie”;
Field:
“Salvage”;
The Journal:
“Thoughts Toward the First Christmas Lecture”;
The Laurel Review:
“DÃ¼rer near Fifty”;
Northwest Review:
“From the Sea of Tranquillity”;
Poetry:
“Accountancy: DÃ¼rer in Antwerp” and “Flight”;
Poetry Northwest:
“Fragments from Venice: Albrecht DÃ¼rer” and “From Campalto.”

Finally, and always, my gratitude to Sydney Kaplan, for the life that led to this work.

FROM
Flights of the Harvest-Mare
(1985) AND
The Stillness, the Dancing
(1988)

The Stillness, the Dancing

I am indefinitely capable of wonder.

FEDERICO FELLINI

Long ago, in the forests of southern Europe,
just south of MÃ¢con, a woman died in childbirth.
She was taken, by custom, to the small slate
lip of a mountain. Legs bound at the knees
she was left facing west, thick with her still child.

Century by century, nothing disturbed them

so that now
the bones of the woman cup the small bones
of the child: the globe of its head angled
there, in the paddle and stem of her hips.

It is winter, just after midday. Slowly,
shudder by civilized shudder, a train slips over
the mountain, reveals to its weary riders

something white, then again, something
white at the side of the eye. They straighten,
place their lips to the glass, and there, far
below, this delicate, bleached pattern,
like the spokes of a bamboo cage.
What, someone whispers, and What, What,
word after word bouncing back from its blossom
of vapor, the woman and child appearing,
disappearing, as the train slips down through the aldersâ
until they are brands of the eyelid, until they are
stories, until, thick-soled and silent,
each rider squats with a blessing of ocher.

And so there are stories. Mortar. A little stratum
under the toenails. A train descends from a mountain,
levels out, circles a field where a team of actors
mimics a picnic. The billowing children.
On the table, fruit, a great calabash of chilled fish.
And over it all, a beloved uncle, long mad,
sits in the crotch of an oak tree.

He hears to his right, the compressed blare
of a whistleâeach sound wave approaching shorter, shorter,
like words on a window, then just as the engine passes,
the long playing out.
He smiles as the blare seeps over
the actors, the pasture, the village

where now, in the haze of a sudden snowfall,
a film crew, dressed for a picnic, coaxes a peacock
to the chilled street. Six men on their knees
chirruping, laughing, snow lifting in puffs
from the spotlights. And the peacock,
shanks and yellow spurs high-stepping, high-stepping,
slowly unfolds its breathless fan, displays
to a clamor of boxcars, club carsâ

where riders, excited,
traveling for miles with an eyeful of bones
see now their reversal.

In an ecstasy of color the peacock dips,
revolves to the slow train:
each rider pressed to a window,
each round face courted in turn.

Mirror

Before the mirror, water gave it
back, the brown surface of another's eye
. . .

It is High South Africa, 1630.
Rabbles of sailors press down the Zambezi.
Now, strewn out through their empty camp:
burlap, fig stones, and thisâ
this oblong, black-backed glass.

Clear night. The first creep in
from the bushwood, sifting.
This is my face, one whispers
. A flush
like a thud in the brain.
This is my face,
unrippled. Its pockets and stains. Its long
surprise.

A mynah calls in her seven voices:
Aye Aye Aye Aye . . .

Something lifts up through the mangroves.
Something sets in.

Tongue

I did not know that my fingers were spelling
a word, or even that words existed.

HELEN KELLER

Imagine another,
blind, deaf since birth.
One, nearly two, she squats at the lip
of a shallow pond. Above her,
the day exchanges its sunlight, clouds.
This she feels in blushes across her shoulders.

With a sleepwalker's grope
she is reaching, patting the cold grasses,
and now, from a tangle of water cardinals
she has plucked a pond-snail. Moist and shell-less

it sucks across her palm.
Tongue, she senses, the simile
wordless, her fingers tracing the plump muscle,
the curling tip.
Someone approaches. To the bowl
of her free hand, the name is spelled,
the tingling
sn
and
ail
.
Again. Again.

And soon she will learn. The naming.
The borders of self,
other. But for now, propped in the musky
shoregrass, it is tongue she senses,
as if the snail, mute, in the lick
of its earthy foot,
contained a story. As if her hand
received it.

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