Flight: New and Selected Poems (5 page)

 

 

 

A little satin like wind at the door.
My mother slips past in great side hoops,
arced like the ears of elephants—
on her head a goat-white wig,
on her cheek a dollop of mole.

 

She has entered the evening, and I
her room with its hazel light.
Where her wig had rested is a leather head,
a stand, perfect in its shadow but
carrying in fact, where the face should be,
a swath of door. It cups

 

in its skull-curved closure
clay hair stays, a pouch of wig talc
that snows at random and lends to the table

 

a neck-shaped ring.
When I reach inside I am frosted,
my hand like a pond in winter, pale
fingers below of leaves or carp.

 

I have studied a painting from Holland,
where a village adjourns to a frozen river.
Skaters and sleighs, of course, but
ale tents, the musk of chestnuts,
someone thick on a chair with a lap robe.
I do not know what becomes of them
when the flow revisits. Or why
they have moved from their warm hearthstones
to settle there—except that one step

 

is a method of gliding,
the self for those moments
weightless and preened as my leather companion.
And I do not know if the fish there
have frozen, or wait in some stasis
like flowers. Perhaps they are stunned
by the strange heaven—dotted with

 

boot soles and chair legs—
and are slumped on the mud-rich bottom,
waiting through time for a kind of shimmer,
an image perhaps, something
known and familiar, something

 

rushing above in their own likeness,
silver and blade-thin at the rim of the world.

First the path stones, then the shadow,
then, in a circuit of gorse and mint,
the room with a brook running under it.
It freshened the milk, the cream that grew
in its flat habit a shallow lacquer,
a veil I tested on slow afternoons
with a speckle of pepper.

 

There was butter, cheddar, the waxy pleats
of squash, green as a storm pond.
Walnuts. Three families of apple,
each with its circle of core fringe.
And the sheen on the walls
was perpetual, like the sheen
on the human body.

 

My mother would sit with me there,
her drawstring reticule
convex with scent jars and marzipan, the burled
shapes of the hidden. Once she brought her cut
flowers to chill until evening, and told me
the mouths of the bluebells
gave from their nectar a syrup elixir.

 

It holds in suspension the voices of choirboys,
she said. A dram of postponement.
And I felt as she spoke their presence
among us: the hum
of the brook just under our feet,

the mineral hush of the plenitude,
then the blackened robes of the blackberry vines
gradually filling the door.

When the cow died by the green sapling,
her limp udder splayed on the grass
like something from the sea, we offered
our words in their low calibrations—
which was our fashion—then severed
her horns with a pug-toothed blade
and pounded them out to an amber
transparency, two sheets that became,
in their moth-wing haze, our parlor windows.
They softened our guests with the gauze-light
of the Scriptures, and rendered to us,
on our merriest days, the sensation
of gazing through the feet of a gander.
In time we moved up to the status
of glass—one pane, then two—each
cupping in proof of its purity
a dimple of fault, a form of distortion
enhancing our image. We took the panes
with us from cottage to cottage,
moth-horn and glass, and wedged up
the misfitted gaps with a poultice
of gunny and wax. When woodsmoke
darkened our bricks, we gave
to the windowsills a lacquer
of color—clear blue with a lattice
of yellow: a primary entrance and exit
for light. And often, walking home
from the river and small cheese shop,
we would squint their colors to a sapling
green, and remember the hull
of that early body, the slap of fear
we suffered there, then the little wash
of recovery that is our fashion—how
we stroked to her bones a cadenced droning,
and took back from her absence, our
amber, half-literal method of sight.

Grit metals drawn to a bourbony syrup,
then the tiny ear trumpet is cast: hand-sized
cornucopia, one tendril of head band.
And the child who has followed this process, pickax
to flame, to the small, curved swelling in his day-pouch,
steps off on a mission to the faltering Beethoven,

 

just as the other, housebound, in a chaos of music sheets
and chamber pots, steps back through his mind
toward Holland. Late autumn. And by noon,
the ice on the deck rails is a lacework of gull prints.
There are waves, unbroken, rolling port to starboard
like a hammock wind. Deep cold. His hands
are made warm by a wrapping of scarf, his feet

 

by the black drapery of his mother's lap.
Through his frost-fed and wave-rocked drowse,
three nuns on the deck are a gaggle of sea birds,
the arced wings of their huge headpieces
lifting their slender bodies. . . .

 

Music sheets. Chamber pots. One beckoning
metronome. And the ear trumpets
send off through his nerves
the sensations of a rake scraped over a harp.
Great pipe shapes. Ladles. Just a coolness in the palm,
then a warmth. Or lined up on the tabletop,
an orchestra of reversals, sucking sound
back in, bell to a pucker of mouthpiece.

A wind has begun in the clear day.
And perhaps they were spirits, there on the deck boards,
a ghostly trio lifting before him—no land
in sight, then his small body so suddenly
his body, so suddenly himself, the hands,
the feet in their soft shoes.

 

Now a child is standing in the open doorway,
the smallest of ear trumpets shining in his hand:
its perfect walls, the perfect, cupped vessel of it.
Look, he is mouthing, what
has risen from the earth to meet you.

 

 

It speaks, now and then.
A lisp at the knee. A needle-trill
where the ankle once arced. Then I reach into air
or the concave disturbance of the bedclothes.

 

And nothing. A pain in an absence. A leg-shaped
absence in pain. I do not know
what it is that calls—
and burns then, unsummoned, like the summer fires
that flame through the bracken.

 

A low cloud blackens the larch trees.
We have opened the channel through Harecastle Hill
and the vases and flake-white medallions
float down its dark tunnel, the canal boats
slender as fingerlings. No tow path
exists there and the workers must
leg the boats through: propped on their backs
on the cabin rooftops

 

must stride down that starless ceiling,
not advancing at all, but
advancing all, walking the eggshell jasper bodies
through the dripping darkness.
They tell me the day draws nearer like a lantern,

 

like the day must arrive
for the climbing colliers: a whiteness
coming closer—but then, as if on the pond
of the inner eye,

 

the intricate, inverted brilliance of a maple.
A glimpse into heaven, perhaps, or its loss,
the image flicked upright in the questioning mind—
in an instant, already gone
even as it approaches, a form
flaring nearer while backing away.

Through the wet and continual trout-chill of earth,
he dropped with his father, past shale beds, black-slush,
down corridors greased with the seeping of springs,
and cranked in the darkness a stuttering flint wheel,
a wand that threw to the pickax and mine walls
quick jitters of light. The sparks left the wheel

 

in fractured arcs and brought from the darkness
oil slicks, water cans, now and then, a canary
in a wash of anthracite dust, each image
at once arriving, departing, at once

 

summoned, extinguished. When gasses crept out
through the drift tunnels, the sparks would thicken,
loll at the wheel, flush to the color of rubies, liver,
and be, it seemed, not fire at all, but a wreath
of some alternate element. And before he ran,

 

pushed by his father—and the other boys
ran with their fathers, calling through the corridors—
he watched at the flint wheel the stopped body
of light, how sparks could be stopped in the shapes
of their bodies, held there, it seemed, forever.

 

Middays they rested, the axes, the guttural rasps
of the flint wheels, silent. And his father told him
of legends, once of the sparrows of northern nations,
how they gathered by ponds in autumn, joined in a circle
wing to wing, foot to foot, and slowly sank into
the water. How they waited together through winter,
long ice pallets forming above them. And the villagers
stooped on the shoreline, watched through the ice
the chestnut bodies, silent in their still circle.
And waited for spring and the sudden rising,
the small birds breaking together to the yellow day.

 

But how could they eat there? he asked his father.
And breathe, with the water pressed over them?

 

They stopped, then began again with their rising.

 

In a wreath? As a single body they rose?

 

That is the story, his father said. Though
we think they rose as sparks.

Plume-shaped and pampered, the flames
at the sitting room hearth are the color
of foxes: sharp amber
dropping down to a sobering port.
It is evening. A boy, Charles Darwin,
having listened as the undertaker's workfellows
removed from the sickroom the body of his mother—
a little satin like wind at the door—

 

turns now to his father's voice.
A story: the magnificent ears of musicians.
The young Beethoven, perhaps. How,
from the blindness of a sleeping mask,
he distinguished for his gathered diners
the clacket of forks from the clacket of knives.

 

A quick rain has begun at the window.
And now the story veers: An uncle once drowned
in the Derwent River, once walked through a night storm
to the storm of the current. And as the water
rises, as his father's voice
approaches this alternate loss,

 

Charles studies the flames until they are foxes,
until they are called from the covert,
their sharp scent firm on the kale. Red coats
and the watery breeches. Black boots. And the ears
of the horses are cropped back to walnuts,
nubbled and sore—the long foreheads
just sloping away, sloping,
and the great eyes stark in their sockets.

A music begins then: deep bay
upon deepening bay, the loping hounds
dark and harmonic . . .
And could the uncle distinguish, his father is asking,
the drops of the storm from the drops
of the river? Just then, with his face
half hidden, half blossoming?

 

And could Charles distinguish, there in the wing chair,
grief from the story of grief? Or fear? Or love
from the story of love? And turn to it—
the grief, the love—harbor it,

 

however the story might buffer, whatever the loss?
As the man who stands in a yellow field
and takes to his lips a silent whistle,
and accepts that a sound is traveling, just over
the kale, just over the wind, and accepts
his place in some seamless extension,
even as, in a wave, the singing animal world
turns back to him.

Silent, in the loose-fisted grip
of evening, he sits with his infant daughter
and makes from his face an exaggerated mask,
sorrow or glee, shock, the eyebrows launched
toward the hairline, the trenches of the forehead
darkening, so that she might learn—
following, mimicking—not only correspondence,
but a salvaging empathy.

 

And often in the chambers and drift tunnels
he gestures with the other miners. Deafened
by the strokes of the widow drills, he
offers that mime-talk, clear as the bell codes
for hoist, for lower. Cheeks drawn, the mouth
a tapered egg. Then he turns

 

in the lamplight, sees the tunnels
gauzed over with dust, feels
his lungs slowly filling, like the gradual
filling of rain ponds, and presses
the widow drill—named for his absence—
through the blue-black petals of anthracite,
through the bones and root-tips,
the shale-brindled cradle of the dead
and the flowering, as the earth

 

of the earth breaks away. Three thousand feet.
Four. His lungs slowly filling. But perhaps I am
spared, he wonders. Perhaps I am held
by this alternate world, cupped
■ ■ ■

and eternal. As once, just a boy, he stood
with his mother in the bath light.
Her white slip, the twin pallets
of her earrings. A fog of talcum
turned at the mirror. In joy
she delivered its snow to the air,
shake upon shake, smiling,
drawing from his own small mouth
the stunned, obedient smile of a guest.
Her face. Her arm in its little arc.
As if she were saying This
is the gesture for
always
as
the weightless powder settled upon them.

Then the day passed into the evening,
a sovereign, darkening blue. And
the twenty-six lost miners,
if living at all, knew nothing of the hour:
not the languid canter
of light, or the wind
curled through the hedgerows. Not pain.
Not rage. If living at all then
just this: a worm of black water
at the lower back. At the lungs
two tablets of air.

 

What is it like there? the broadcaster asked,
his voice and the slow reply
cast down through the time zones of America.

 

A stillness. All of the families
asleep in the fire station.
And the mineworks pale on the landscape.

 

What else?
Nothing. Blue lights of police cars.

 

What else?
Nothing.
Nothing?
. . . The thrum of the crickets.

A thousand files on a thousand scrapers.
A thousand taut membranes called
mirrors
amplifying the breed-song. A landscape of cupped wings
amplifying the breed-song. A thousand bodies
summoned to a thousand bodies—and the song itself a body,
so in tune with the dusk's warmth
it slows when a cloud passes over.
Today. Tomorrow. In that May Nova Scotia darkness
when the earth flared and collapsed.
Before that May. After that darkness.
On the larch bud. On the fire station.
On shale and the grind-steps of magma.
On the gold straining in its seam bed.
On the coal straining. On the twenty-six headlamps
swaying through the drift tunnels. On the bud.
On the leaves, on the meadow grass,
on the wickerwork of shrubs:
dark cape of desire.