Flight: New and Selected Poems (11 page)

They darken. In the sky over Florence,
the oblong clouds swell and darken.
And hailstones lift back through the updrafts,
thickening, darkening, until, swollen as bird eggs,
they drop to the cobbled streets.

 

Horses!
the child Galileo thinks, then
peeks through the doorway
to the shock of ten thousand icy hooves.
At his back, his father is tuning violins,
and because there is nothing sharper at hand

 

Galileo saws through a captured hailstone
with a length of E-string,
the white globe opening slowly, and the pattern inside
already bleeding its frail borders.
Layers and layers of ice—

 

Like what? Onion pulp? Cypress rings?
If only the room were colder, and the eye
finer. If only the hand were faster,
and the blade sharper, and firmer,
and without a hint of song . . .

Deep space. The oblong, twinkle-less stars
matte as wax pears. And the astronauts are losing heart,
the heady lisp of auricle and ventricle
fading to a whisper, as muscles shrink to infants' hearts,
or the plum-shaped nubs of swans.
Atrophy, from time in space, even as the space in time
contracts. And how much safer it was—
ascension—at some earlier contraction, each flyer intact,

 

cupped by a room-sized celestial globe
staked to a palace lawn. How much easier, to duck
with the doublets and powdered wigs
through the flap of a trapdoor and watch on a soot-stained
copper sky the painted constellations, or,
dead-center, a fist of shadowed earth dangling from a ribbon.

 

All systems go, of course: each moist,
diminishing heart, just sufficient at its terminus to fuel
the arm, the opening hand, to coax
to the lips a fig or pleated straw. Still, how much easier
to drift in a hollow globe, its perpetual,
tallow-lit night, while outside with the mazes and spaniels

 

the day, like an onion, arced up in layers
to the dark heavens. How much safer to enter a time, a space,
when a swan might lift from a palace pond
to cross for an instant—above, below—its outstretched
Cygnus shape, just a membrane
and membrane away. A space in time when such accident
was prophecy, and such singular alignment—
carbon, shadow, membrane, flight—sufficient for the moment.

My companions since childhood, these numbers.
My constant counterparts, as lime kilns
steamed on our green hills

 

and my father grafted to russet knuckles
a golden apple's fingerlings. (That first stalk
six posts from the gate, and the gate
twelve strides from the pond.)

 

Each winter, I loved the ermine's harmony,
how it stitched over fresh drifts
the parallel pricks of its tracks. And the pale,

 

symmetrical petals of snow, how they covered
our seventy houses, our eight hundred
yoke of good arable, good meadowland,
our four hundred ninety souls.

 

 

Tomorrow, November closes—
and, polished by frost, the church bells
respond with a clarity. Already,

 

one-fourth of the compost
is eaten by lime, one-third of the belfry
by shadow. How the second hand ticks!
Stay with me, now, as I wind through my first life. . . .

 

 

 

Back from the workbench and lamp, the tilt
of the microscope's mantis head, back from the droplet
of sea, salted by powdered radium,
and the lift and swirl of its atoms—the buffed,
invisible globes of its atoms—she sat
with her apple and knife, confined to her wide bed.

 

I am thinking of red, she said. And those
primary years, gathered like cardinals.
Although there were no cardinals, of course.
But gooseberries. And roe, there was roe
so gold it was red. All the fruit trees were padded
with cabbage leaves, and she climbed, red in her pinafore,

 

through their crackling branches. Now and then,
from the movements of children above her,
dry cabbage leaves rained a brittle parchment.
And then, just silence, as they sat with their meals
of bread and gooseberries—like mythic birds
in their bright aprons—while the Polish sun,

 

for miles to the west, cast to their pale,
partitioned land the fractured shadows of fruit trees.
Thinking of red . . . corpuscles, their freight of typhus,
their glowing freight of radium. But—no—today
just the red of those childhood years. Roe.
And apples, how the ships slipped down from Kasmierz,
laden with apples. Thin ships, so weighted they seemed
just prow, great horses legging the yellow river.
On deck, she would watch the straw raked back,
as the scent of a thousand russet apples—
nested like cardinals—rose in the winter air.
She could toss to the river the blemished ones—

 

the captain gave permission—then cover her basket
with perfect others, the red, chilled, perfect
globes, so cold they would fill the season.
But even the blemished lingered awhile,
lifted and dove through the clear air, and sent
to the prows and empty docks, to the winter rafts

 

and long horizon, their sets of concentric rings.
Before they sank through the closing water,
they lifted and turned as . . . atoms must. Or better,
cardinals. Although there were no cardinals,
of course, just flight and its watery echo, red
over red, over red, as far as the eye could see.

Lovely, he thinks, stepping off from the shoreline,
how the pond erases his shadow
in equal proportion
to the body its water accepts. Until, as shadow,
he is nothing, just head and an upraised arm—
while, pale in the pond, he is Benjamin Franklin,
a child with a kite on a string.

 

And now he is cargo, drawn by the wind,
as pond water slaps
and the kite's red gills billow. Such pleasure,
shoulders to toes, all
down the slim, cirrus shape of his body,
to be pulled by the wind, half fish, half bird,

 

while horse carts clack down the Boston streets, deep
in their own progress, and shadows
slip westward, and the long fingers of tallow,
pale in his father's shop, dip and thicken and dip.

 

Blue day. On the salt marsh hills, other boys play out
their landlocked strings, crisscrossing
the grasses, heavy as pendulums. Only one,
young Franklin, floats with his kite,

 

weightless and tethered in equal proportion.
White-knuckled, good-natured, he would wave
if he could. But he is a staple
binding the elements. White knot
at the end of a stitch. And lovely, he thinks, to be
both the knot and the stitch. That
is the secret, isn't it? To be, at once,
all body, all soul. That is the key.

Black-robed on the green hillside,
he seems less shape than space—Abbot Napp—
a gap in a flock of April lambs.
Then wind opens his wide sleeves and the flock
scatters—his little ones, his progeny, bred, crossbred.

 

In this first morning light, I am turning
the garden, kneeling and rising, my apron flapping
its own dark wing. Such a daybreak of drops
and ascensions!—winter on the pebble, sunlight
on the nape, and the black soil swallowing

 

my pea seeds, like beads through a crow's gullet.
With grace and patience, the Abbot
would cancel in his scattered lambs
the parasites, the strucks and toxin shards
that yearly fell them. But life's eluded him

 

and so he breeds for beauty: a triple crimp in wool,
a certain glint in lanolin. And the spiral horn—
that curling cornucopia—corrugated, green-cast,
shaped, he says, by repetition's needs.
(
Not unlike your pea pods, Gregor.
)

 

Beautiful, he tells me, those circling, dusty pleats.
And if only he could breed there some brief
continuation. Another swirl, he says, another turn
on matter's slender axis. Another rise—
Gregor
—
another dip. Before the ripping tip.

When Abraham Ortelius fell in love with the world,
sometime in the autumn of 1560, and vowed to map
its grand expanse, its seas and serrated coastlines,
that the mind might hold, as it does an onion,
“the weighty, layered wholeness of it,”
a tulip was launched, from Constantinople's limpid port
toward the deep-water docks of Antwerp.
Still tucked in its fleshy bulb, it rode
with a dozen others, rising and falling
near the textile crates, as the ship slowly crossed
the southern sun, past Athens and Napoli, Elba, Marseille.
This is the world, Ortelius said, holding up to his friend,
Pieter Bruegel, a flattened, parchment, two-lobed heart.
And this, Bruegel answered, paint still damp
on his landscape of games, each with its broad-backed child.
It was an autumn of chatter and doubt, wonder
and grief and a quick indignation, sharp as linseed.
Slowly the ship tracked the Spanish coast, rising
and falling as the rains began, and the olives darkened,
and red-tunicked soldiers, increasing their numbers,
rode north toward Flanders. When the bulb
of a tulip is parted—its casing is also a tunic—
it reveals to the eye the whole of itself, all it will need,
like a zygote cell, to enter its own completion:
roots and pulp and, deep at the center,
leaves and a coil of bud.
That is the world, said Pieter. And that, said Abraham,
each beholding the other's expanse: on a single plane,
the oblong, passive hemispheres and, as if caught
by a closer eye, stocky, broad-backed, hive-strewn shapes,
alit in their grave felicity.
Mistaken for an onion, the bulb was roasted
near the Antwerp docks, then eaten with oil and vinegar.
Still new to the region, the others were buried in soil.
In Abraham's early folios, South America blooms
from its western shore, articulating a shape
that has yet to appear, while in Bruegel's dark painting,
a child on a hobbyhorse whips a flank of air.
Neither man lived to see, in 1650, at Nuremberg's
Peace Fair and Jamboree, fifteen hundred boys
on their wooden horses, fifteen hundred beribboned manes.
Watched from the highest balconies, they filled the square
like tulips, some said. Like soldiers, said others.
Although none could be seen completely. At last, all agreed,
they gave to the square a muted, ghostly atmosphere,
like the moods in medieval tapestries
that hold in quiet harmony violence and a trellised rose—
although the sun that day was bright, all agreed,
and the wind splendid and clear, as it carried
the taps of those wooden hooves, and lifted
the ribbons this way and that, this way and that,
until night, like the earth, covered them.

To stroke from stone the hovering bee—
to release from marble its white thorax—the hand
must turn back on itself, palm up, fingers curved,
with the gesture of skipping stones over water.
And to sculpt the wings, the hand must arc downward,
fingers stiff, with the gesture of rubbing grief
from the brow. And so, Gianlorenzo Bernini learned,
carving bees for the Pope's family shield, for the churches
and Roman fountains: palm up
in the workshop, palm up in the world; fingers stiff
on the chisel and brow; hand curved to the hammer,
hand curved to the wine glass; palms pressed
for the wafer, palm up for the thorax, the coin,
for the quick rains that washed from his skin
the decades of white dust.

 

To free Saint Teresa to her ecstasy, or Daphne
to her leafed future, the hand must know first
the promise of wax. Or graphite. Or the tepid flesh
of clay. The hand must know first
the model. These are the angles, Bernini said,
for the animate, human form: acute, obtuse,
salient, re-entering. Hour by passing hour,
his room filled with stone chips and ciphers,
the metallic scent of mathematics. Now and then,
a brief snow tempered his marble horses.
Now and then, migraine headaches made lace
of his world. These are the compasses, slipped
from their soft pouches. And these, the reflex angles
of their pivoting leg, when the hand, circling,
turns back on itself.

To curry from stone the texture of silk, or feathers,
or the fluid parchment of bee wings, the hand
must pursue the source, must open to fullness
the brief wing, or the downward slope
of the lover's robe, so that stone might turn back
on itself, might climb through the strata of bedrock
and centuries to echo the living—just as the living
climb down into stone. These are the hand strokes,
Bernini said: frontal, alee, emergent, re-entering.
For the climbing, shapes to their shaped reversals—
as, two days from his death, shapes would climb
through his right arm, through the long wick of his nerves:
little sparks, little Janus flames, lighting their own
departure. Then a thrum, he said. All through the flesh
that thrum. Bees. White bees.