Flight: New and Selected Poems (2 page)

The child in the wagon remembers a sound:
leaves that clicked down the cobblestones
like the toenails of running dogs.
It was evening. She turned, expecting the worst,
and found instead the swirl of madrona leaves
and then on the street corner
candle flames cupped in their glass boxes.

 

It will not hear that sound again, she thinks,
and looks to her left, right,
where the long Conestoga wagons bumble
through the switchgrass. There are forty, indigo
and red, moving not single file but
abreast,
their hoops and canvas hoods swaying white, and
seen from above, the child thinks, like a wave
spilling into the harbor, its line of froth
and the dust swelled up behind like a second wave.

 

So the pattern continues, until day ends
and the center wagons stall, all their horses
simply stepping in place as the end wagons
arc toward one another and the wagoners
on their lazyboards draw up
their perfect circle, like the nets of Maine fishermen.
That evening, near sleep on the floorboards,
the child describes to her parents
the sound of madrona leaves, running dogs.
How, for an instant, fear passed through her
like an icy tooth—the long-haired sea dogs
rushing in from the ships—
and then there was nothing: leaves, a certain peace.

And that sound . . . like this? her mother whispers,
clicking knives to a pewter cup. Then the father—
who will die in October, his cheeks in miniature
the caved salt cliffs they are leaving—
begins, tapping this, that, this, that,
until the wagon, in its circle of wagons, fills.
And there on the canvas, the child thinks,
how beautiful the hand shadows are:
great moths come in from the wilderness.
Like this? they ask. Like this?
As if in a moment, the absolute sound
might appear—then the dogs rush past, thick with loss.
And there would be peace.

First the skip stutters down its rail-line
and the miners, stacked together, knee to knee-back,
stomach to buttock, watch
the clouds, one Douglas fir, a V-tip
of station roof, condense, condense, until
everything they have walked through is a little moon
shining one hundred, one thousand feet,

 

and exchanged now, from below, for a sparkle
of dusty headlamp—
its growth, like a moon, then
the face and great-boots.

 

It is always raining. Always
the temperature of sliced ham cooled on a platter,
a placemat, these things of another world.
And unfolded, the miners step into their day, which is
night, walking behind one another
out through the drift tunnels.
An ore cart wobbles by, steaming
with quartz rubble, a little gold perhaps,
the size of a thumbnail, pushed up
from the earth's molten center, through the molten veins,
pushed and pushed—the great pressure, great heat—
to this exact intersection of
vertical, horizontal. . . .

 

Ears pop.
Someone is singing. And beyond,
from another chamber, comes the whistle of nitrate
billowing up from its spitter fuse.
Now and then some tremble may continue, up
through the ankles, thighs. There is the wheeze
of a bank collapsing, and into the drift tunnel

 

creep the poisons of powder fumes, methane.
It is then, with the motion of bathers, that
the miners dip into their airmasks, bite
down, and turn together, all
the headlamps reversing their light

 

to its first horizon.
And nothing can stop what follows,
not science, not the elements:

 

in a grave interaction of chemicals, saliva,
the airmask biteplates begin heating.
Past the mulch and black-slush, into the skip,
up through the timbers, they grow hotter,
hotter, scorching the tongue,
the palate, until the miners, trapped by a halo
of methane, by the slow pull
of the skip-cable, feel their hearts withdraw, feel
their nerves collect in this new center, foreign
and not—all the flames pushing off,
regathering—the great heat, great pressure—
foreign and not.
But for their eyes, these workers are the color of
quartz rubble, stacked
and lifted . . . lifting . . . past the shale beds,
limestone, from the rain into the rain . . .
and here is that moon, swelling to meet them—
old ghost, old platter of steam—
and here is the world of the world.

 

 

One man in a derby hat, another
in leggings, and a woman
with the brown, sensible shoes of a chemist.
Just behind these friends
is a thermal circle of
dwarf willow, eyebright, and heath—
and before them, the slack basin,
no hiss and bellow, no steam
hurling up its magnificent stitch.

 

There is urgency on these faces.
Already the snows creep
closer to this mild setting,
like a ringmaster's animals.

 

To encourage pressure, the man
in the derby hat drops
chunks of pan soap through the quiet water.
They sink like yellow skulls,
and then on the surface

 

he sees the rippling legs of the woman,
his own small face in its black topknot.
A woodcock sings from a tangle of willow.
The man thinks of his wife at the loom, how
often in the late, thin light her beautiful arms
cross and recross the breast beam

with the strokes of a swimmer.
There is pain in his shoulders, in
his pale neck stretched
over the basin. He thinks of a time
when love, in terms of
his place in the world, was everything.

Even in the rigging there is chaos,
the foremast and mainmast square-rigged,
the mizzenmast and jibs fore-and-aft-rigged, so their lines
cut in at slants, sharp and terrifying,

 

like the slant-lights of the Scriptures.

 

And their flurry is extended to the deck,
where snow curls up with the chocks.
By midnight the waterbuckets freeze, each claiming
at dawn a wafer of thumbskin, peeled back

 

from its slick under-mate like the eyelids of the dying.
We are just below forty now: Franklin, Fitzjames,
the surgeons, ice-master, thirty seamen, and cook.
And a small bird the color of celadon,
of the hummocks and fog-green fjords stumbling
off from the shoreline. It carries just under a wing
a circle of fuchsia down, blinking out
now and then like our lost sun.

 

Northwest Passage! Not even a harbor. Barrow Strait,
Boothia, Cape Felix. And the days are lessening.
We inch to the south as the icebergs themselves inch off
from the main-pack: the crack and rustle,
the slow letting go.

 

What world is this that tightens under us—
each time the wind recedes, freezes
under us, leaving just our small bouquet
of masts and grindstones, a hogshead of sugar?

Now and then, ice-locked in this awkward
and constant half-light, we walk over the floes,
watch the simple flight-strokes of snow bunting,

 

then carry their image to our own companion.
It washes its wings in cabin air.
As the fuchsia circle blinks out, again and again,
we practice our game of resemblances, creeping
closer to all we have been:

 

God's eye, someone offers. Or ember.
Raw thumb! A taffeta underskirt.
Or a blossom a bullet might leave,
on its journey to a darker harbor.

 

 

Not the rat, then. We assumed it was the rat,
scratching up not hell exactly, but
the path there. We assumed
it was the spider, leech,
each in from its Gothic other, those zones
with us and not, like sleep.

 

But the dog, gray dog—
flock-guider, companion for the slow
rowing—pads in from the hallway,
your life in tow.
And please,
there is something wrong with the light,
this muzzle, honed to a trowel,
its jab, retreat, this
dirge through a smile of froth. Up
from your ribs, lungs, up
from the hollows you walk through—

 

wind, black shoe, the sun at your eyelids,
the simple bread—up from the ghost
and the animal, you answer—bellow,

 

hideous whine—while he slumps to the floorboards,
clear-eyed, pants
Run
with me, darling, the meadows, the lost day.

In a wide hoop of lamplight, two children—
a girl and her younger brother—jump marbles
on a star-shaped playboard. Beside them,
in a chair near a window, their father
thinks of his mother, her recent death

 

and the grief he is trying to gather.
It is late October. The hooplight spreads
from the family, through the window,
to the edge of a small orchard, where
a sudden frost has stripped the fruit leaves
and only apples hang, heavy and still
on the branches.

 

The man looks from the window, down
to a scrapbook of facts he is reading.
The spider is proven to have memory, he says,
and his son, once again, cocks his small face
to the side, speaks a guttural oh, as if
this is some riddle he is slowly approaching,
as if this long hour, troubled with phrases
and the queer turn in his father's voice,
is offered as a riddle.

 

There is the sound of marbles
in their suck-hole journeys, and the skittery
jump of the girl's shoe
as she waits, embarrassed, for her father
to stop, to return to his known self, thick
and consistent as a family bread.
But still he continues,

plucking scraps from his old book, old
diary of wonders: the vanishing borders
of mourning paper, the ghostly shape
in the candled egg, beak and eye
etched clearly, a pin-scratch of claw.

 

A little sleet scrapes at the window.
The man blinks, sees his hand on the page
as a boy's hand, sees his children bent over
the playboard, with the careful pattern
of their lives dropping softly away, like
leaves in a sudden frost—how the marbles
have stalled, heavy and still on their fingers,
and after each phrase the guttural
oh, and the left shoe jumping.

These three things then: They have eight eyes.
They have memory. Their images do not overlap.

 

They leave the brood-cocoon when the last grains
of yolk rattle in their pearly bellies.
Each climbs a blade of grass, a twig,
a splintering fence . . . anything sharp and solitary.
Here they send a thread-hook for the wind.

 

The launch is terrifying: Whipped to a current,
gusted, their legs sucked behind at first
like so much hair. But somehow they shinney,
and they ride those gossamer V's like arrowheads.

 

This process—the launch, the travel—this is
called ballooning. Some balloon for days.
They are often found in a ship's rigging
hundreds of miles from shore.
Or matting an airplane windshield, like cloud-frays.
Those who survive live their lives where the current
drops them. They do not balloon again.

 

Now, finally, the eyes. They can not converge.
One pair may see you—not as a face, exactly,
but a pale avoidance—just as another sees
the mantel tray, like a gold sun
without heat or shadow.

 

The eighth eye is tucked below, and has a range
no higher than your knee. It sees only floors,
soil, crackles of plaster. It is the memory eye.

Sometimes when a draft gusts under the door,
or wind whisks the porch, the eighth eye remembers.
It is all very fast—just a spark, in fact:

 

The wide rush of sea, perhaps a few whales below,
like sun-spots. And then the great, flapping
net of a sail.

 

Of course, the wind should be very brisk.
But since there is memory,
this is how it must be.

High winter. All canals
clogged with an icy marrow. And the flax—
just a blue wash in the mind of
the painter who puffs up the tower stairs.
It is the time for festival—Aris Kindt
is hanged. And soon

 

up through these same stairs, up
to the slope-seated deal and chestnut
Theatrum Anatomicum, the surgeons will come:
Mathys and Hartman, Frans, Adriaan,
three Jacobs, then the bleeders and barbers,
the wheelwrights, needle-makers, goldsmiths,
the potters and sculptors, two
thin-chested harehounds. A lesson!
A dissection! All the reverent, mercantile faces
peering off through the scaffolds

 

that are now just empty, just a deal and chestnut funnel tapered down to a corpse: Aris Kindt. Quiver-maker. One necklace of rope-lace curled under his ears—while over his body, the shadow of a painter's hat circles, re-circles, like a moth at a candle.

 

So this is fresh death, its small, individual teeth.

 

Rembrandt walks past the breechcloth, then the forearm
soon to split to a stalk that would be grotesque
but for its radiance: rhubarb tendons
on a backdrop of winter. He swallows,
feels the small dimplings of lunch pork

 

drop away. And here will be Tulp,
his tweezers and white ruff. And here,
perhaps Hartman, perhaps the shadow of
a violet sleeve closing over the death-face.
It is commissioned: eight faces
forever immortal, and one—slightly waxen—
locked in mortality! He smiles.
How perfect the ears, and the pale eyelids

 

drawn up from the sockets
like the innerlids of pheasants. Just outside a window,
the day has climbed down to the amber color
of this candlelit room. Rembrandt turns,
crosses out past the sponges and vessels.
There is the sputter of wagon wheels through a fresh ice,
and in all the storefronts
torches hang waiting for a pageant—

 

scarlet blossoms for a new spring.

 

His room has turned cold with the slow evening.
Far off in a corner
is a canvas clogged with the glue-skin of rabbits—a wash
of burnt umber, and the whites
built up, layer by layer.
Now a fire, the odor of beets.
And here, where the whites buckle, will be Tulp,
perhaps Mathys, their stunned
contemplation of death. He touches a spoon,

then a curve of plump bread. All across his shoulders
and into his hairline winds a little chill,
thin and infinite, like a thread-path
through the stars:
there will be umber
and madder root, yellow ocher, bone-black,
the scorch of sulfur, from
the oils of walnut and linseed—all things of the earth—
that forearm, that perfect ear.