Flight: New and Selected Poems (8 page)

All the bodies like fallen cattle.
And the snub-brimmed caps. The war. Civil.
Brady's shadow, at times, rinses a photograph
with its black pond. But the image I keep

 

is a blasted meadow. Burdock, bloated sacs
of lungwort. And up from the earth's fresh trough,
I think, the mineral scent of ripped grasses.

 

Henry slumps in the grip of a toothache.

 

If I were real, I would help him. But I
am the fabric of well-water—slick and transparent—
my voice a bird where my shoulder should be.

 

In the Doctrine of Signatures, each plant
cures the body it mimics.
So the liver-shaped leaves of hepatica
temper the liver's jaundice, and snuff
from the snapdragon's tapered neckline
heals the tubular body of the human throat.

 

Heart leaf and toothwort.

 

Steam from the kettle
has cast a late dew on the ladles.
And a privacy to each of the windows.
In print after print, Brady centered the men
facing east. The sandbags and cannons.
One midday, I centered our cousins with an eastward
glance, fresh for the incoming hour.

In the darkroom musk, they
rose through potassium baths
with the languorous ripples of flounders . . .

 

Steam. Its simmering mist.
If I were real, I would offer a flower. But I

 

have taken a body of water, stirred
through with cyanide salts. Slick and transparent,
they stroke their signature to the echoing self.
Which is nothing. And from which
nothing rises at all.

 

 

Like winter fog, the coal dust climbs her stockings,
although the coal itself has long departed, tumbled
barrow by barrow to an alternate shelter.
She scrubs the floor, sets across the gaping boards
square vats of rank collodion, of alcohol
and pyrogallol. Still the coal dust blooms,
until her apron darkens and her hem-strokes
brush to the path's pale stones

 

a soft hieroglyphics. She has walked
to the glass henhouse and bundles the hens
to their new roost, one wing at her breast, one wing
in her hand, the stiff legs riding her forearm.
Their livingness, she says, touching
a wattle and ruby comb, the tepid feet that stretch,
then curl, like something from the sea.

 

So the coalshed becomes her darkroom
and the henhouse welcomes the bent Carlyle,
Darwin and Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow,
each posed near a curtained backdrop, each

 

sharp in his livingness: a glaze of amber earwax,
a leaf of tobacco like ash on the beard.
But the portraits . . . Unfocused, critics say. The lens
stepping down into fog. Aberrant. Distorted. Although
she prefers Undefined, as in Not yet captured

by the language of this world. They are rich
with the inner, she answers, with a glimpse of the soul
flapping up through collodion baths,

 

darkly transparent, like the great bats
that flap near the henhouse windows. She watches them
break at dusk past the tree line
then flash at the windows and flash, as if
they are seeking their lost counterparts—although
they are not birds, of course, but dense with wings,
so dense the sleek, half-opened wings

 

would cover a wattle, a comb, and opening, easily
cover the back, the breast,
and easily opening cover the tail,
the yellow, tepid, stretching feet: like
a dark sea spreads over its garden.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dressed in an ebony suit,
could the soul of William James, they asked me, slip
past the bakery counter, his slack lapels
dusty with flour? Or walk on the cobbles
in those soft shoes? It was God, of course,
not James they questioned. And No, I said, No
suit, no Deity. We are the finite, meat-mechanisms

 

of matter. The uproar then! He was seen—dark shoes,
trousers—all the newsprint dripping with sightings!
Look down to your own shoes, I told them. There,
in the fluoroscope's green wash, your Inmost Essence

 

flexes. I remember Dally in his white coat,
week after week, bent
to the X-ray's beam, to the bloat
of ghostly photos, as the peephole burned its round tattoo
on his brow and cheekbone. How the beam itself
nibbled him—fingers, toes, hair, spleen.

 

A lantern through dust, he whispered, is a kind of gill.
It was Wednesday, a week from his death, some
childhood dust storm storming again.
He spoke of its wind and the launched soil,
the anemone-sway of the darkened sheep, as slowly,
heads dropped, they crossed, recrossed
the smallest arc of battered turf.
And lamplight in the barn,

 

although it was midday. And although it was midday
the sunset began. Crimson, he said,

just over the sheep, just over the alders, the yellow
sweep of hedgerow. And false, of course, some light
at play on the facets of dust. But . . . wonderful,

 

he told me. His bones on the fluoroscope's pale screen
tapered and flared, the nodules of toe-tips
black, protrusive, like ghastly buds—a presence

 

that walks with us always, I think, flexing its grip
invisibly. And that visible sunset he fashioned,
slumped on its false horizon?
Some vibrant, wind-churned absence,
defined by dust and reverence.

These are the names of the horses:
Occident. Elaine. Abe Edgerton. Clay.
With a shutter's quick clickings, I stopped them,
then dealt the divine and its opposite, picture
by square picture: the unwinged body in flight—
two hooves pushing off, then one, then none—
and the pact of that flight: groping forelegs,
the horn-sheathed toes thrust out like cane tips.

 

Time after time, from the beauty of motion
came the pickets of stasis! And yet,

 

I remember the heart of a snapping turtle,
grotesque in its florid two-step. We had peeled back
the breastplate, dragged the body by cart past the eyes
of twelve cameras, the cart wheels tripping the shutters.
I could not watch the motion then, but
turned instead to the open mouth, the palate ridged
like a walnut shell, turned instead to the static photos—
where something, hollow and weightless, a poppy perhaps,
where something twelve times, like a poppy,
was pressed and released by a rhythmic wind.

 

I stopped the pine snake and horse. Or better,
I held them. Field cat. Hawk. The wake
of a coastline steamer.

 

In a northwest harbor one autumn, I watched a meadow
flood to a cranberry pond. Then a man with a rake
pulled the blunt berries from their soft vines.
They floated around him, filling the surface,

red and amber and that last yellow before it is red.
He stood in the pond, and the berries, like evening,
absorbed him, his boots and thighs. They covered each
glisten of the water, until only the sharpest shining
survived, where the rake cut a path through the redness.

 

What would I hold? All. Almost all. The poppy
in its soft backdrop. The hawk. And the horse,
the great weight on the last hoof,
then the lifting of that weight.
What would I stop? Only the path
of the rake, I think, that arc
reaching over the pond and the circling hour.
Only the need to reach over.