Flight: New and Selected Poems (10 page)

 

 

Dear One,

 

Do you have the time? Can you take
the time? Can you make
the time?

 

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,

 

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.

 

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.

 

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,

 

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

 

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

 

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.

We understand the egg-sized ship,
the thread-and-spindle masts, the parchment sails
puffed to a rigid billow.

 

And the lightbulb that enfolds it.

 

We understand the man, Graham Leach, his passion for
impossibles.
We see him,
tucked within the vapor of his jasmine tea,

 

while heron-toed forceps slowly wed

 

a deckhand to a tear of glue.
The rudder would lodge in the bulb's slim throat
but could be folded, slipped inside, reopened

 

into seamlessness. We understand that sleight of hand

 

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,

 

it mirrors the museum shelf, and to the left

 

the plump barque, static in its perfect globe.
Perhaps he blew a gaping bulb
then tucked the watch inside, rewarmed the glass,

 

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,

 

the wrinkled Roman numerals—

 

still fixed, still spaced to mark the intervals
of space, but rippled,
a dozen, ashless filaments. The filament

 

itself is gone. Gold's light enough, perhaps.

 

We understand, to make a living bulb,
three hundred wicks were tried. Before a match was found.
Oakum, fishline, flax, plumbago. A coconut's

 

starched hair. A sprig of human beard.

 

Three hundred tries, before some agent, tucked
within a vacuum globe, could catch the rasp
outside—that friction-fed, pervasive tick—

 

and channel it, and draw it in.

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.

With a framework of charts and reckonings, reason tells us

 

they died from time, the rhythmic tick of hub and blade
that, turning, turned their fuel to mist.

 

And reason says, while Earhart held the plane

 

balanced as a juggler's plate, Noonan tipped the octant
toward the stars, and then, no radios
to guide them, toward the dawn and rising sun.

 

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,

 

the hair-thin, calibrated
when
s. Reason says they died

 

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

 

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,

 

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:

 

the black Pacific closing over them. And then,
the click of glasses, orange and radiant.

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.

 

Surrounded, one surrenders. Blindsided,
collared from behind. Then silence, or so
my friends revealed, the arc across their patchwork fields

 

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

 

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

 

a dorsal silence came. And, turning, filled
the sunken streets, the fallen dikes, the slow,
ice-gripped periphery where frozen cattle closed

 

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.

 

 

Sly-eyed and weightless, my violet rooster
quietly crosses a tent's blue dome.
He is buoyant, inverted, a migrating, wattled chandelier

 

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

 

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,

 

a galaxy of urine rolls, each oval drop bloated,
indistinguishable, they say, from the stars.
And the sextant quivers through this human heaven!

 

 

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,

 

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 little
glint, and rhythmic tick.

No chemist, Delacroix!
His paints will not dry.
Over time, the horse heads would sag into roan melons,
the portraits scowl, the lions relax their clenched jaws,

 

were they not, on alternate years, hung upside down
on their brass hooks—walls of inverted Delacroixs
regaining their borders, seeping back into neck scarves
and bridles, as my specters seeped back into
birch leaves. On those lessening nights, I watched

 

my father, asleep in his slim bed. His shoulders
and chest. Now and then, the glisten of herring scales
at his wrists. Head back, his full beard pointed toward
Mars, he seemed balanced there between death
and exertion, while the tannery's smells—sharp
as the odors of art—swept over us, and its
paddocked cattle, in the frail balance
of their own hours, shifted and lowed.
So this was the body
emptied. Exhausted. I stood between
terror and splendor as time and what must be
the soul—as the day and the day's morning—
seeped back to him.

And so they are circling back, the riders,
a talc of pumice on their boot soles.
When it all began, they said, and gravity
first dropped its grip, an effluvium of parts
flew up, hidden from brooms and the vacuum:

 

a curl of ash, a comb's black tooth, one slender
strip of cellophane, and what must have stung
those steady hearts: a single, silver screw—

 

now vertical, now cocked, now looping slowly
past each troubled face. . . . But nothing failed,
and so they've turned, the fire of their engines

 

a violet-feathered plume. My acrobat kicks up
one weightless leg. And holds. Across the room
a green tea brews. Their pulses
must have lurched, then stalled—the screw, the soft,
undissipated curl of ash: their craft
was crafted, and, crafted, flawed!

 

I see them in their silver suits, stunned
to numbness, as, looping slowly by, two sets
of pale, concentric rings fused nothing
more than air and human quickening.
An eye-blink's time, perhaps, before they felt
themselves return: that wash of rhythmic strokes,
that hum.

 

But that was their
moment, their wonder.

 

I tremble before my own heart.