Flight: New and Selected Poems (3 page)

Through the scratch-strokes of piñon, the hissing
arroyos, through the clamped earth
waxed and swollen,
coil to coil, paddle to anvil,
the bowl on her palm-skin blossoms,
the bowl on her lap
blossoms, the lap blossoms

 

in its biscuit of bones.
Bract-flower, weightless, in the pock and shimmer
of August, she slopes from the plumegrass like
plumegrass. And the white skull
bobbles and turns. The gingerroot fingers
turn. Through the cocked mouth
of a buck deer, she sketches an arrow,
its round path nostril to heart.
For the breath going in.
For the breath going out.
Wind to heartbeat. The blossoms of steam.

 

 

Wait. The groom stops,
right hand in mid-air, mid-ceremony,
about to descend to the cupped right hand
of the bride. What is that noise?
At their feet, the ice-gray griffin terrier stops.
Two puff-shouldered witnesses just entering
the chamber, just entering the scene
through the iris of a convex mirror,
stop. And follow a curling sight-path
from the elegant to the natural: from the dangling
aspergillum and single ceiling candle, down,
past the groom's velvet great-hat, his Bordeaux robe,
past the stiff-tailed lapdog, the empty
crow-toed wooden sandals, to
a trail of yellow apples—desk, ledge, windowsill

 

and out.
There.
Below. It is
the rasp of water casks on the hunt mares, squeezed
stave pin to stave pin, as
they are shouldered across the canal bridge. And the mares—
how brilliant in the high sunlight:
one roan, one walnut, eight legs
and the rippling ankles rippling again
where the slow Zwin passes under. In a moment

 

they will cross, step on with their small cargoes
past inns, the great cloth halls steaming with linens.
The mudflats have dried now. All their patterns
of fissures and burls like the rim
of a painter's palette. Once or twice
the cones of yellow flax straw will flicker,
the autumn birch leaves flicker,
the mares lurch left, then

 

right themselves—nothing to fear after all: not wind, motion.
Not even a sleeve of sackcloth slipped over the hoof.
To quiet the hunt. To make from its little union
not a predator, but a silence.
Just the half-light of forests, black leaves
on their withered stems,
then the graceful, intricate weave closing over
the mossy sole—as a hand might be closed
by a descending hand,
pale, almost weightless, and everywhere.

Just one crack against the sandbar
and the grain freighter crumbled into
itself like paper in flames, all the lifeboats
and blankets, the tons of yeasty wheat
sucked down so fast the tumbling sailors

 

still carried in the flat backs of their brains
the sensations of the galley, smoky with mutton fat,
someone's hiccup, someone's red woolen sleeve
still dragging itself across their eyes

 

even as the long sleeve of the water closed over them.

 

It was 3 a.m., the third of November, 1891.
Just to the south of this chaos, where the Columbia
washes over the Pacific,

 

there was shouting, the groan of stable doors,
and over the beachfront, a dozen
horses were running. Trained
with a bucket of timothy to swim rescue,
they passed under the beam of the Klipsan lighthouse,
passed out from the grasses, alfalfa,
deep snores and the shuffle of hooves,

 

and entered the black ocean.
Just heads then, stretched nostrils and necks
swimming out to the sailors
who were themselves just heads, each brain
a sputtering flame above the water.
Delirious, bodies numb, they answered

the stallions with panic—
So this is the death parade, Neptune's
horses lashed up from Akasha!
And still,
through some last act of the self, when
the tails floated past they grabbed on,

 

then watched as the horses
returned to themselves, as the haunches
pulled, left then right, and the small circles
of underhooves stroked up in unison. Here
was the sound of sharp breathing, troubled
with sea spray, like bellows left out in the rain,
and here the texture of sand on the belly,
on the shirt and thigh, on the foot
with its boot, and the naked foot—and then, finally,
the voices, the dozens gathered to
cheer the rescue, the long bones of the will,
causing hands to close over those rippling tails,
yellow teeth to close over the timothy.

I've seen it drive straw straight through a fence post—
sure as a needle in your arm—the straws all erect
and rooted in the wood like quills.
Think of teeth being drilled, that enamel and blood
burning circles inside your cheek. That's like the fury.
Only now it's quail and axles, the northeast bank
of the Cedar River, every third cottonwood.

 

It's with you all morning. Something wet in the air.
Sounds coming in at a slant, like stones
clapped under water. And pigs, slow to the trough.
One may rub against your leg, you turn with a kick
and there it is, lurching down from a storm cloud:
the shaft pulses toward you across the fields
like a magician's finger.
You say goodbye to it all then, in a flash over
your shoulder, with the weathervane so still
it seems painted on the sky.

 

The last time, I walked a fresh path toward the river.
Near the edge of a field I found our mare, pierced
through the side by the head of her six-week foal.
Her ribs, her great folds of shining skin,
closed over the skull. I watched them forever, it seemed:
eight legs, two necks, one astonished head curved
back in a little rut of hail. And across the river
slim as a road, a handful of thrushes set down
in an oak tree, like a flurry of leaves
drawn back again.

First the salt was removed,
then the axes and powderhorns,
the blankets, jerky, shot-pouches, gourds,
the kettles and muslin, the burlap torsos of
cornmeal, and the wagons hauled on the coil of rope,
hand over hand, up
the last granite face of the High Sierra,
dangling, wobbling fat in that wind like lake bass,

 

then the oxen, pushed up the spidery trail—
in the concave crooks of their shanks,
the mules, centered and pushed—

 

and then it was all restored.

 

Soon the nut pines yielded to scrub pines, the wind
to the screams of the handcarts—
wooden axles, wooden wheel hubs,
day after day, the haunting, wooden voices.

 

Now and then, the lowland flashed up
through the trees, russet and gold-filled:
Ophir, Mineral Bar, the American River. Then
the scrub pines gave way to the black oaks, the wistful
manzanitas. On the bank of a river-fork
someone knelt, pinched the gravel,
plump and auriferous. Two others
talked of their journey, and the journey
of gold, of their last descent and that climbing:
fold-fault and lifting, erosion,
glaciation, explosion,
the magma and silica scratching upward,

 

pin-step by pin-step to meet them.
All night the rain washed over the wagons,
cut down through the wheel ruts and fire-pits,
the powdery topsoil, as if to say
Deeper, just a little deeper,
and in the morning, pulled up in the muzzles
of mules, dangling in the grassy root-tips,
that gold dust, that ending.

Picture a domino. A six perhaps, or placid
four. And resting upon it, like the grids in some
basement windows, three thin vertical lines.
This is a staff—for the dance notations of Rudolf Laban.
Torso twists, step turns and wrist folds,
gallops, jumps, all the motions
a body might make—in space, in time—
contractions, rotations, extensions, from head tilt
to the crook of the left thumb's outer segment,

 

spatter the staff in symbols. Black dots
and miniature boxcars, tiny rakes
for the fingers, double crosses for the knees,
the right ear's sickle, the eyebrow's mottled palette,
each intricate sketch on its half inch of grid line—
until a string of speckled rectangles

 

might tell us a foot was lifted,
set down at a slant on the metatarsus,
as a man might step down a path of loose stones.
In the late-morning light, on the road to New Lebanon,
his elbow jumps with its bucket of lake bass.
Now and then, a whistle begins, spreads
into song, then the slack-cheeked slip into piety.

 

By midday his movements are rhythmic,
have become this dance passed down
through the centuries, then trapped in a patchwork
of labanotation. Two circles: one men, one women.
Stage left, a singer, a pulse of percussion.
The music begins and the circles are carriage wheels,
then closer—almost touching—are the black-specked wheels
of a gear: one men, one women, in turn almost

 

touching, then the arms flung up in denial,
the bodies flung back into rippling lines,
fused, yet solitary, like a shoal of lake bass.
If there were lanterns then, they are lost here,
and smoke, the odors of sawdust, linseed.
But the costumes are true—white bibs and transparent
skullcaps, each foot in its column of black boot—

 

and the dancers strive with an equal devotion,
as if the feat of exact repetition were a kind of
eternity. Black dots and miniature boxcars.
Step here, they say, just here. And a foot is lifted,
a quick smile answers, This is enough, this striving—

 

daylight as it is with its sudden rain,
all the pockets of loose stones glistening.

As Whistler heard colors like a stretch of music—
long harmonies, violet to amber, double hummings of
silver, opal—so, in reverse, these three in their capsule,

 

free falling two hours through the black Atlantic, ears
popped, then filled with the music of Bach or Haydn,
might fashion a landscape. Low notes bring
a prairie perhaps, the sharps a smatter of flowers,
as the pip notes of sonar spring back to the screen
in little blossoms. They have come for the lost
Titanic

 

and find instead, in the splayed beam of a headlamp,
silt fields, pale and singular, like the snow fields
of Newfoundland. On its one runner blade the capsule slides,
slips out through drift hummocks, through
stones the Ice Age glaciers dropped, its trail
the foot-thin trail of a dancer, who
plants, glides, at his head the flurry

 

of a ship's chandelier, at his back a cinch-hook of icebergs
cast down through the winds of Newfoundland.
The music these three absorb
stops with the wreckage, with words
lipped up through a microphone:
flange, windlass, capstan, hull plating,
then oddly, syllables
at a slant, as light might slant through window slats,

 

stairsteps, doorknob, serving bowl, teacup, Bordeaux.
Mechanical fingers, controlled by the strokes
of a joy stick, brush over debris, lifting, replacing.
In jittery strobe lights, camera lights, all colors

ground down to a quiet palette,
angles return, corners and spirals
pull back to the human eye—as if from some

 

iced and black-washed atmosphere, boiler coal,
a footboard and platter, each common shape
brightened, briefly held for the sake of retrieval.
The current spins silt like a sudden storm.
With the intricacy of a body the capsule adjusts,
temperature, pressure. Someone coughs, then the three

 

sit waiting, as in Whistler's
Sad Sea
three are waiting. All around them are dollops
of winter wind, everywhere beach and sea. No horizon
at all in this painting, just a grey/brown thrum
beach to sea. How steady his breath must have been
on the canvas, his hands on the brushstrokes
of lap robes, of bonnets and beach chairs, the pull
of a red umbrella: each simple shape
loved and awash in the landscape.

A little wind. One creak from a field crow.
And the plow rips a shallow furrow, hobbles
from guide-stake to guide-stake,
draws its first contour line,
and parallel, its next, next,
then the turn-strips and deadfurrows, the headlands
and buffer lines, until the earth from a crow's vantage
takes the pattern of a fingertip.

 

And by noon the shadows are gridways: cut soil,
the man on the plow, the plow and simple tail,
each squat on a stretch of slender shade,
black and grid-straight, like the line of anti-light

 

a screen clicks up to, before its image
swells, deepens. Dark glass
going green, in the shade-darkened room
of a laboratory—it casts a little blush
across the face there, the shoulders and white pocket,
then magnifies the moon-skin of a microbe, then deeper,
electron molecules in a beam so stark it smolders.

 

The man on the plow fears frost,
its black cancer. The man at the screen
fears the storm an atom renders
on the lattice of a crystal. And heat. And the slick
back-licks of vapor. With luck, with the patience
the invisible nurtures, he will reshape

 

frost-making microbes, snip frost-hook genes
with a knife of enzymes. And at thirty degrees,
twenty, through seam lines of snap beans, oranges,
almonds, potatoes, no frost will form, no ratchet-bite
of ice, all the buds of transformed microbes
blossoming, reblossoming, like the first flowers.

 

There is wind at the rim of the black-out shade.
One tick of the focus gears. Another. On a glass plate,
enlarged from nothing to filaments, the lines
of DNA wander, parallel, in tandem,
curled together past pigment blips, resin,
as the contour lines for autumn oranges
swerve in unison past boulder pods. The light

 

through the mottled skins of genes
is not light at all, but friction, caught and channeled,
like pigment caught in the scratch-marks of caves.
This was our world,
the marks say: horse, maize,
vast gods drawn down to a palm print.
Drawn up from nothing the microbes gather,
a little wind on the curtain,
sun on the curtain's faded side, on the crow and plow,
on the earth sketched perfectly to receive it.