Flight: New and Selected Poems (12 page)

With tweezers light as a pigeon's beak,
I have clipped from each stamen a pollen-filled anther:
hour by hour, three hundred tiny beads, dropped
in my robe's deep pocket, their yellow snuff
sealing the seam lines. And thus,

 

I emasculate peas that would sire themselves.

 

Heresy, some say,
to peel back the petal, sever the anther, stroke
to the open blossom—with the sweep of a pollen-tipped
paintbrush—another blossom's heritage.
Heresy, to mingle seed

 

fixed in the swirl of the world's first week.

 

Rest, now.
The bird-beak tweezers mute on my lap.
In France, where orchards yield to upswept Alps,
they have tied to the legs of pigeons
parchment memoranda—silk threads

 

encircling the flaccid skin, and a burl of words

 

that lifts between neighboring rooftops.
Twofold, I believe,
the gift of those gliding wings:
for the mind, script,
for the soul, the sluiced shape of the thermals,

 

at last made visible to the upturned eye . . .

My fingers are weary. Snuff in the seam lines.
To ward off the breeze and the bee,
I have tied to each blossom a calico cap. Three hundred
calico caps. From afar in this late-day light,
they nod like parishioners in an open field,

 

murmuring, stumbling slightly through the green expanse,

 

as I, in my labors, am stumbling. And all of them
spaced, it appears, on the widening arc
of some grand design. Blossom and cap in some
grand design. Vessel and motion and the tinted threads.
Heresy? Have I not been placed on that widening path?

 

Am I not, in my calling, among them?

At hand: the rounded shapes, cloud white, the scissors, sharp,
two dozen toothpick pegs, a vial of amber glue.
It's February, Cambridge, 1953,
and he's at play, James Watson: the cardboard shapes,

 

two dozen toothpick pegs, a vial of amber glue.
White hexagons, pentagons, peg-pierced at the corners—
he's at play, James Watson, turning cardboard shapes
this way, that. And where is the star-shot elegance

 

when hexagons, pentagons, peg-pierced at the corners,
slip into their pliant, spiral-flung alignments?
Where is that star-shot elegance? This way? That?
He slips together lines of slender pegs that quickly

 

split in two. (Pliant, spiral-flung, one line meant
solitude. But one to one? Pristine redundancy.)
He slips. Together, lines of slender pegs quickly
conjugate. White hexagons, white pentagons:

 

not solitude but—one, two, one—pristine redundancy.
So close the spiral shape, now. Salt and sugar atoms
congregate: white hexagons, white pentagons.
So close the bud, the egg, the laboratory lamb,

 

the salt and sugar atoms' spiral shape. So close—
it's February, Cambridge, 1953—
the blossom, egg, the salutary lamb. So close
at hand, the rounded shapes—cloud white—the scissors—sharp.

Why now, under seven fathoms of sea,
with sunlight just a sheen on its carapace
and someone's dark paddle stroking above?
Why, at this moment, does it lift from the reef
its serrated jaws, its four, undulant,
tendril arms—the fifth atomized
by a predator's nudge—to begin
the body's slow unbuckling? Near the reef,
a kick-dust of plankton hovers. And eelgrass.
And far down the sea floor, the true starfish
in their dank, illegible constellations.
What salt-rich analgesic allows
this self-division, as the disc parts
and tendril arms, each with a thousand
calcite eyes, sway into slender helixes?
Half disc and half disc. Limb pair; limb pair.
Two thousand eyes; two thousand crystal eyes—
that must notice now the emergent other,
aslant but familiar, slowly swimming away:
its butterflied, genetic list, its tendency
toward luminescence. Limb over limb,
where is it headed? And when will its absence
echo, adrift in the sea's new weight?
Half shape; half shape—how far will it stroke
before loss, like daylight, lessens,
and the one that remains twines its optic arms
to look to the self for completion?

They darken. In the ponds and springs near Stuttgart,
the oblong newt eggs swell and darken, cells
and their daughters, afloat in a cytoplasmic bath,
splitting, re-splitting, until, swollen to fullness,
they stroke through the brimming world.

 

Milkweed,
the scientist, Hans Spemann, thinks,
then peers through a microscope's steady beam
to a shoal of landlocked seeds.
At his back, his newborn stirs in a wicker pram.
And because there is nothing softer at hand

 

Spemann saws through a two-celled newt egg
with a length of the infant's hair,
the plump globe opening slowly, and the matter inside
already building its new borders.
Two, then. Two lives. And how many sires—

 

Hans Spemann thinks—and how many heirs?
If only the path were brighter, and the lens
finer. If only the hand were surer
and the blade sharper, and firmer,
and without the glint of time . . .

In autumn, 1879, on a day like today,
the physicist, Charles Vernon Boys,
touched to a spider's quiet web a silver tuning fork,
its long A swimming a warp line, up and up.
The hour's the same, the hemisphere,
and so the sunlight must have banked at this degree
across his buttoned sleeve, and the steady A
stroked a morning's molecules
much like these—although the note I hear
is organ-cast, cathedral-bound, and the sleeve
this sunlight banks across
drapes in tempera from a saint's clasped hands.

 

Godless in this god-filled room, I'm drawn less
to the saint's sacrificial fate than to the way
like instruments vibrate sympathetically,
or how this painter's ratio of bone to powdered umber
precisely captures a dove's blunt beak. I'm drawn
to his abidingness, the hands that slowly milked
egg white from its yolk, and ground the madder root,
and shaved the gold, and sealed it all
in a varnish skin (although the skin's a web now,
shot through with cracks).

 

Perhaps he whistled, low in his teeth,
a tuneless breath that dried the saint's wet eye to matte.
Perhaps he scraped the iris back, and built
the ground, and scraped again, to make the light
interior (then varnished it, to make the light eternal).
Propped on a garden bench, a C-fork buzzed, Boys said,
whenever the A was struck. And the spider whirled.

Then down a warp line, desire's leggy shadow
rushed—and rushed—scraping its beak
on the silver mass, silking the tines,
convinced until the last, Boys said,
all that hummed was food.

Radiant, in the Paris sun, the clustered chairs
and canopies, the clustered leaves, one and one
and one—and down the boulevard, the circus tent
in a blowsy park, the Hospital, boulangeries,
the Institute where Curie turns, then takes
in her blackened, slender fingers a finger-shaped

 

tube of radiation. And the blue Atlantic, radiant,
the American shore, the gold-flecked palette
Paul Cadmus lifts. It is a midday and sundown
in March. He will paint on the flank of an acrobat
a gilded skin. She will stroke down the test tube
a ticking wand. There is sunlight on their sleeves,

 

as the equinox shifts and the pale-bricked house
of Physics throws open its smallest doors. Radiant,
the boulevards and shorelines, the peat fields, polders,
steeple tops, the Appalachians, Pyrenees,
the river-etched terraces of Warsaw.
And the circus tent with its acrobats, stern-faced

 

and gilded, circling the ring on their parallel horses.
Radiant, their sudden shape, like fission's sudden
pyramid: one on the shoulders of two, two
on the shoulders of four, four on the eight
pumping, glistening haunches, and the sixteen
polished hooves, mute in the swirling dust.

The glow, how can I express it? My god,
it lifts from protein flecks, up and across
this crafted lens. From flecks of nothingness,
enlarged twelve hundred times, its simple, cold
fluorescence lifts, green as early pea pods.
Like Mendel's progeny, it blinks across
the vines of probability, the sap-glossed
spindle threads. How Gregor would have swooned.

 

Again today, soft bandages entwine
my sodden legs: edema's finery.
I know, of course, Death draws his liquid kiss
along my soul, his tepid, sallow brine.
A monk, in love with nature's symmetry,
I complement that kiss. I rise to it.

 

 

I compliment the kiss. I'd rise to it
in time, my gloved guide says. These clumsy hands
could, in time, trace a cell's meridian
or dip into a nucleus a pipette's
tiny mouth. In time, I'd brush chromatic
residue throughout an egg cell's curved expanse—
but we're just setting slides today, kissing glass
to glass to glass, click by sterile click.

 

Symmetry. The ram's curled horn. The ermine's tracks.
The leaded windowpanes, mute now with snow.
The hourglass I turn, re-turn (the pressing

down, the rising up). Twin cones. Fused necks.
Its counterpart once toppled us, once blew
across my darkened room a single, flapping wing.

 

 

Across our darkened room, it flaps its single wing.
Magnified one hundred times, it skims the scope's
broad screen, dips between the waterweed. Protist,
he says. Not plant, not animal, its wing
a single cell, its cell a self, a kingdom
set apart, both intermediate and whole.
We turn away. Our task's to track the glow
again. A deeper world, fluorescent, green.

 

Midday, October, 1870.
Above, air currents from the west-northwest;
below, air currents from the south: a two-toned
cloud bank sparking. Then from the prelacy
I saw, through sudden hail, a helixed axis
glint. And then the two-coned mass: cyclone.

 

 

Out past a two-coned mass it glints, cyclone-spun or flung by trembling chromatin
quaking through this microworld. Shifting spindles
make the cones; shifting slides—I fear—this windblown
scene. But what veers by, star-shaped, black? And thrown
by what? It's just a speck of retina,
of course. Light's one-celled ash. Vision's glinting
artifact, intermediate and whole.

One pressing down, one rising up. And one,
alone, black-robed in the prelacy, convinced
those counterwinds would cancel him, would catch
within their compound eye the black-robed mote
he would become. And still, the scientist
within me watched. I held the desk and watched.

 

 

The scientist within me watched the desk
withdraw, and then the scope's glass stage, and then
a pocked, nucleic wall, as down we spun,
the shapes that held the shapes all slipping back,
peripheral. And now, two dye-cast
spindle poles appear, magnetic discs that seem
to summon chromosomes, that seem to bend
the stuff of us: east-southeast, west-northwest.

 

Five seconds long. Its path three fathoms wide.
And through the glass it shot a chink that, until
then, had held the heavens back: an earthen span
of roof tile, flitting like a deadly bird.
Across my desk, it tapped its leaden trill.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Six inches from my hand.

 

 

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Six inches from my hand,
the desk clock turns, but we're outside of time,
our movements inward, vertical, unaligned
with moving on. Within this polar land
a micro-Borealis glows, green-banded
through the protein globes. From jellyfish, my friend
has spliced genes for green fluorescence. They find
expression
here, he says. As do we, firsthand.

 

Silence. Infernal symphony of bricks
and wind and breaking glass . . . quieted. At rest
against a wall, the flapping, asymmetric bird
was just a tile. And I, no longer parts—
heart or soul or watching eye—was just
a monk, released to love—again—the world.

 

 

A monk, released to love the world again—
how Mendel would have blossomed here. Reversed
astronomer, he'd chart these inmost
lights of us: sky-shapes expressed through scrims
of sea. And counting traits, he'd diagram
what shapes await us. As we do now—with dextrous
grace, my gloved friend boasts. (Although, in these frail years,
mere skill seems thin.) Not grace? he asks. Well, mercy, then.

 

Silence, then through the frost of shattered glass
an afterglow arose—or pressed—fully formed
but borderless. As I will be, the swirling world
subtracted from the I of me: wind, chalice,
heartbeat, hand. . . . Weightless, measureless, but beautiful,
the glow. How can I express it, my God?