Flight: New and Selected Poems (4 page)

This thimble one, with a lentil clapper.
This one of shell.
These top-notched ones, for the harnesses of horses.
And these, for the fist-shaped, candle-spun
carousels of children. This one of the pear-shape,
this of the tulip, the fish mouth, the pomegranate,
the beehive. This room-sized one, stung
by four men in black braids, their arms
underhanding a muted log, in unison,
underhanding, casting the sanded log-tip
to the lotus-etched sweet-spot of the bell,
then again, underhanding in unison, like
the casters of waterbuckets, the ring and the splay,

 

and slowly, the child closes her book. A sound
has begun, just out from the window. A tap-scratch,
thwirr. Some rabbit, perhaps, trapped
in a shallow snare, great hind feet
plucking tufts from the crabgrass. She rises,
sits back in her soft chair, rises. Perhaps she will
witness a certain death, but the shelter of the book
is memory now, the path to the window
infinite, nothing, as she steps, stalls, steps, then
slips shoulder first to the waxy pane—and there
is her brother in the orchard below, casting stones
with a sling through the dense, brittle leaves
of the sugar maples. No targets at all there, no prey—

 

his small head tipped and attentive—just the pull,
release, then, long after, the answerings.

 

 

 

Nothing grows in the shadow of great trees . . .
And yet, in a wine cask's shadowy tube—oak aged
and curved to a first-growth trunk—
his legs inched up from his ankles.
He was sixteen, alone. By a storefront window
in Craiova, great breaths of chocolate
sighing out from a churn stick

 

held him. And the pattern of wheat dust
on silos, the pattern of corn
on a pulpy cob, like the grid marks in squid.
Hunger. Its spidery grip. And then he was hired,
dipped by the wrists into wine casks.
Small, slender—the restaurant above him
no more than a wind of garlic—he lathered, scrubbed,

 

all the pips slipping out from the rough-hewn wood,
all the bristle tips, esters,
and the odors of yeast, wet wool, the wine sludge
curved to the shape of his knees, his fingertips
curved to the oak blebs: body and barrel
in equal exchange—a melding, a kiss.

 

Days passed. A year. Often at dusk
he read cards at the restaurant tables, watched
the wide Rumanian faces swell, withdraw.
From the circle of Chariots, of Towers
and delicate Hanged Men, a fear would begin,
brushing up through each face like a wine flush.
Enigmas. The queer burbles of candle wax.
Then a cello spun out its long notes, binding,
cupping them all to the known earth,

 

as, morning by morning, the slats of an oak wine cask
cupped his small body. Sometimes
he sang there—cello songs, drawn down to the tempo
of bristle tips, splinters. Sometimes he studied
his hoop-slice of sky: looped from the ceiling, from
strings like the rays of geometry, amber onions,
three halved by the barrel rim's sharp circumference,
beets and beet tufts, and, weekly,

 

the marbled hind legs of a roebuck.
Globe shapes, light-polished, or cragged
by a smatter of earth. Then weekly,
arcing into his view from a fuller body,
two thighs, two hocks, pulled tight at the hooves
by a thread of rawhide: pale form in a fixed arc,
like the memory of motion, like a bird stalled
in the ice-winds of space, its stillness, flight.

The wheels of the train were a runner's heartbeat—
systole, diastole, the hiss-tic of stasis—
as they flipped through the scrub trees and autumn grasses,
slowing at last at the station lamps.
And perhaps the fever had carried this memory,
or the journey, or, just ahead in the darkness,
the white, plump columns of lamplight.

 

He is five, six, locked at the center
of the evening's first parlor game:
Go stand in a corner, Lyova, until you stop thinking
of a white bear.
To his left,
there is pipe smoke. Behind him
a little laughter from the handkerchiefs.
And in his mind, white fur
like the blizzards of Tula! He studies the wall cloth
of vernal grass and asters, a buff stocking, trouser cuff,
but just at the rescue of a spinet bench
two claws scratch back. A tooth. Then
the lavender palate of polar bears.

 

I cannot forget it,
he whispers. And would not,
through the decades that followed—
the white, cumbersome shape
swelling back, settling, at the rustling close
of an orchard gate, or the close
of a thousand pen-stroked pages,

 

white bear, in the swirls of warm mare's milk,
at the side of the eye. White bear,

when his listless, blustery, aristocratic life
disentangled itself, landlord to
shoemaker, on his back a tunic, in his lap
a boot, white bear, just then,
when his last, awl-steered, hammer-tapped peg
bit the last quarter sole.

 

In the gaps between curtains. And now,
in the lamp-brightened gaps between fence slats,
there and there, as if the bear
were lurching at the train's slow pace,
and behind it—he was certain—the stifling life he fled
rushing to meet him: family, servants, copyrights,
just over the hill in the birch trees.
Simplicity.
He sighed. Dispossession.
A monastery, perhaps. Kasha in oil. At eighty-two,
his body erased to the leaf-scrape of sandals.
And even the room near the station, the small bed
with its white haunch of pillow,

 

even the mattress, where he shivered
with fever or a train's slow crossing, and whispered,
and, just before morning, died,
was better. Deep autumn. Already the snows
had begun in the foothills, erasing
the furrows and scrub trunks, erasing at last
the trees themselves, and the brooks,
and the V-shaped canyons the brooks whittled.
There and there, the landscape no more
than an outreach of sky, a swelling, perhaps,
where an orchard waited, then boundary posts, fence wire,
then, below, the lavender grin of the clover.

Clover-rich, lugged close to the thorax and twirring heart,
wax-capped, extracted, the viscid liquid
is not gold at all, but the color of cellophane, ice.
A little heat and its sugars may darken,
emerge, as fingerprints rise through a dusting of talcum,

 

but there in the dry-packed winter beehives
it is clear, the complex nothing of air or water.
And warm—although the orchard outside has slowly chilled,
snow on the windbreak, deep snow on the hives
in their black jackets. The honey is warm,
and the hive walls, and the domes of bearded wheat straw
tucked under tarpaper rooflines.

 

To nurture this tropic climate, the bees
have fashioned a plump wheel, clustered body to body
on honey cells, chests clicking out a friction, a heat—
faster, slower, in inverse proportion
to the day's chill—while the hives
keep a stable ninety degrees, warm-blooded

 

as the keepers who cross through the beeyard.
They move with the high-steps of waders, a man,
his daughter. He clears blown snow from the hive doors.
She lowers her ear to the deep hummings.
Like mummies, she thinks of the cloaked rows, like
ghosts. Then salt pillars, headless horsemen
turned white by some stark moonlight.
In a flurry the images reach her,

their speed almost frightening, splendid,
as if the myths and fables of her life are a blizzard
drawn suddenly to her, drawn suddenly visible
through some brief interaction of
temperature, light. And the day itself then
swells a half-step closer: the sky and knotted
peach trees, her father's thick form
smelling slightly of bacon. He turns
and a bowed ear blooms, backlit a moment
by the sudden sunlight, little veins and spiderings
plum-colored, then fuchsia, as a warmth spreads
over his face, her shoulders, over the windbreak
and hive doors. She opens her jacket and soft liner.
The bees, in their perfect circle, still.

Thirst. And the slow pains of the stomach.
Her heart gives the sound of an oar through water, blunt
and diminishing, or the slipping of hooves over oak roots.

 

No window in view, yet the door near her bed
frames the nut trees and sycamores, the cows
folded down in a clearing. Like an alchemist's mark
for infinity—loop beside loop, horizontal eight—
each body curls back to itself: shoulder arched, neck dipped,
head
stretched back to rest on a circle of hip.

 

Their milk will kill her, their journeys down game paths
to the white, forest blossoms of snake-root.
Bud high with poison, the vine plants rushed,
muzzle, to milk vein, to udder, to a thirst
whose final magnification seems a form of mockery.

 

An ax claps somewhere to her left. The table
with its belly of puncheon casts the shadow of a ferry,
as if the floor were again the flat Ohio,
Kentucky behind, Indiana just ahead in a chaos of trees.
Someone coughed then, she remembers. Sharp coughs,
skittering. Someone sang of the journey the soul

 

must make, little boat over water. Their home
took the color of chestnuts. She read aloud
from the fables of Aesop: foxes and eagles. The crow
and the pitcher—its water out of reach,
just off from the tongue, his beak at the rim

like ax strokes. To her left they are chopping,
then whittling a clearing with fire. They are stacking
ripped vines, saplings, and underbrush
like a plump wreath at the base of a sycamore.
It will burn in an arc-shaped heart, huge
and magnificent, dark veins of heat
ripping off at the edges. Will the birds break again then,

 

out from the trees? The passenger pigeons and parakeets
lift as they have in a thick unit, their thousand bodies
dragging the shadow of a wide pond

 

down over the game paths, down over the oak trees
and cattle, the doorframe, bedposts, cupped hands,
bellows, the cheese in its muslin napkin?
Until shape after darkened shape floats in a wash of air?

 

Thirst. Braiding every thought back to an absence.
She drinks from her cup. Drinks again. On a hillside
the children are laughing, called out from their sorrow
by the spectacle of flames. Or by birds
in a sudden jumble, perhaps. Or the placid cows
catching handkerchiefs of ash on their broad faces.
How simply two circles can yield to each other,

 

curl back to each other without ending:
raised shoulder, a dipping, raised hip.
The path an oar makes in water, in air, then in water.

 

 

Perhaps this, then: the holystone licks
of the winter Rhine. A cleansing.
A scouring away. Anything to free him
from the constant filling.

 

Weeping, in slippers and dark robe, maddened
by phantom voices, music,
he walks from his house with
the tentative half-steps of a pheasant.
A little rain collects on his robe hem,
and street meal, the cubiform dust-chips
of cobblestones. He has carried no coin purse
and offers to the bridge guard
a silk face cloth, then the image
of a man in bedclothes, in the quarter-arc of flight

 

from raining to river.
There is wind—upward—
and the parallel slaps of his slippers.
With the abrupt closure of a trumpet mute
his heart stops. Then the music, voices. Water
has flushed through his robe sleeves, and
the thin, peppered trenches
between groin and thigh.

He will surface
as an opal surfaces: one
round-shouldered curve of brocade in the wave-chop.
Then his heart kicking back.
And the oarlocks of rowers who are
dipping to save him?
A-notes and A-notes—perfect—in unison.

 

 

What else but to starve?
The starched coats of asylum guards
give a fife's chirrups. They are joined by
tintinnabulum, chorus, and oboe
on his brief walks to the ice baths.

 

At the first flat shocks and frigid clearings
he smiles, murmurs
that his madness is at least his love,
distorted, of course, pervasive, but still . . .
aural
. A music. The trees

 

by the fenceline fill, release. One year,
two. He follows halfway, taking
into the self the quarter-notes of
footsteps, the cacophony of laughter, wagons, doors,
the hums of the candle-snuff.
Writing stops, then speech. No word,
no flagged dot on its spidery stave
to diminish the filling. What else but

 

to turn from all food, to decrease from without
like the August peaches? To take at the last
the fine, unwavering balance
of an arc—heart and perimeter—
a cup where all sound resonates? . . .

 

A bell has fallen in Moscow,
he once wrote,
so huge it carried its belfry to the ground
.
And into the ground. The bell lip
and shoulder boring deep in the earth. Then
a cross-rip of belfry. Then, through
the stark reversal of summer grasses,
four pale steps leading down.

At first quick glance and lingering second,
the five, sludge-smeared miners on the roadway—
through this pre-morning light, with their shock
of canary in its braided cage—
might have seemed to the five ringers approaching

 

like a portrait of memory, like the sway
and blear of themselves in memory: the bend
of bootsoles in the myrtle grass, black
caps, yellow lantern flame, the knapsack stings
of rhubarb and mildew. And the village

 

below, coal fires granting to the fresh day
plumes in the fashion of cypresses—base knot,
stalk, the splintering crown-tip—a kind
of memory also, as the ringers trudged
up the hillside, past the miners and smoke strings,

 

past the fluted iron churchyard fence, the dollops
of marble headstones. Then into the breezeway,
where belfry steps accepted the trudge,
and the bells, above, waited. Five. In a blend
of copper and tin, each shouldered the hub ring

 

of a great wheel, the bell ropes lashed to spokes
and threaded, the soft-tufted cordage
dangling down to the ringers like a spray
of air roots. With the motion of climbing
the treble was cocked, pulled up to suspend
■ ■ ■

at the balance point, waist and mouth-edge
inverted, hovering. Then the others cocked,
turned up, each ton of fish scale-glistening
arc at rest of a pin-tip of stay.
And toppled. One after one, treble, second,

 

third, fourth, tenor, toppled. Quick pump and
spillage,
like heartbeats. Again, the ringers releasing
the strike and hum notes, handstroke to backstroke,
the bells pulled up, up, the snapping ropes wound
up, tail tufts and sally-grips in the jig-play

 

of dancers. All morning, the swinging
treble wound through its hunt path, a nudge
into second ring, third, fourth, and the second
replacing the tenor bell, and the third knocked
into lead. In the village the day

 

was a braiding of change-rings, notes swelling,
fading, as the bells turned. In the bracken
and mine shafts. In the foundry, when the forge
bellows hushed and the furnace tapway
spilled a rush of smoking bronze down bricklined troughs in the earth floor. Bell notes. When
bronze curled down through buried bell molds, cut
half-rings
in the earth, cut bell shapes. When the cupped clay
flared and stiffened. Bell notes. Change upon change.
Then ending. Ending. In an instant, closing back

in their first order. All ringers for that second
claiming past, present, like walkers on a roadway:
in the half-light of morning, one shock
of canary in a braided cage,
one curve of lantern flame approaching.