Flight: New and Selected Poems (6 page)

In that gill-light of late autumn evenings,
the valley children had crept through the corn rows,
two miles of withering tassels, styles, of leaves
cocked like the flaps of a fool's cap—had crawled
from the gap of the access lane, out
down the rabbit paths, lanky, long-abandoned stalks
the perfect maze. We were parked by the roadside.
Six cars, seven. To the west, the wide
Stillaguamish River swelled to a bay.
Far behind us, the children in the cornfields stood—
no hood, no grit-dusted cap breaching the tassel line—
stepped left, some right—just a ripple, just
a ribbon in the stalks—turned, turned again,
the chirrup of their voices thickening, darkening,
until the quick fear they courted flared and stung
and someone on a step ladder—mother, uncle—
swung a cowbell in a beckoning arc

 

and homed them all. We were parked by the roadside.
Coffee, the crackle of short-waves. To the west,
the wide Stillaguamish reached over the stop signs,
reached into the eaves of outbuildings, saddles
and private treasures glistening, lifting,
dollops of burlap like jackets in the waves.
On a table-sized island, two Guernseys turned
in a thicket of snowberry, muzzle to tail. As their hoarse
voices collapsed into the brays, the wild rain began,
resumed. Water to water. And across the surface
of this new bay, across the pedestal of the rain,
the spawning salmon—steelhead, chinook—having
lost the borders of the river, shuddered and leapt,
thrust in through the mustard fields, through rooftops
and the pivoting sentries of weathercocks, their fins,
the long seams of their bellies stretching, dipping—seeking
one thick current to resist.

When his eyes took the half-sheened stillness of fish roe,
he tightened his helmet, cinched its inner cap of
canvas straps until the dome above wobbled, swayed
with a life of its own. We were not to touch him,
he said, but wait on the sidewalk until his soul returned.
His hat had a decal that captured light
or hissed out a glow when the light diminished. We were
not to touch him, but watch the ballet of his arcing arm
as he opened the fish, the chum and ponderous king,
flushing the hearts, the acorns of spleen. We were young
together, fourteen or fifteen, and still he returned
to the fish houses, his sharp hands working the knives,
disappearing in flaps of cream-tipped flesh that
closed like a shawl. He showed us the opaque archings
of ribs, brought into our schoolroom the weightless gills,
book-pressed and dried, the spine he had saved that
snapped apart into tiny goblets. We saw him one night
fallen by the river—saw the light from his helmet,
that is, lurching in the long grasses, slicing its
terrible path like a moth grown fat and luminous:
if what flashed there could be seen as a body,
could be stopped in the human hand.

He would come, Darwin, in a yellow-wheeled chaise,
past the mine shafts and whim gins, the bottle kilns,
past the patchwork of geese on the carriageway,

 

and counsel her father on the treatment of gums,
of eyelids, or the maddening rasp
in the knee, his long physician's bulk
trembling the floorboards as he walked.

 

She would stand by his chair
to study his face, his skin with its smallpox scars—
each cupping, she felt, a grain of the finest pepper—
how his chin pulled back as he stammered
his verses: the t's and c's, the shivering n's:

 

 

how his fingers resolved into slender tips,
tapered like formal candles.

 

He brought to her once
two sheep-jaw skates, fearsome and splendid
in their muslin pouch, the teeth in brackets
on the leather boot soles, each jawbone below
filed to a blade. And walked with her then

 

to the winter pond, the white shrubs
with their blossoms of crows. The teeth were chewed
to a biscuit brown, with streaks of white
where the grasses ran. And the grinding fissures,
spidered like glass, chafed her a bit
when she touched them.
Hang o'er the gliding steel,

 

he recited,
and hiss upon the ice
. . .

 

his words a series of quick clouds
as she circled before him, gliding in fact
on bone, not steel, with the sound of her strokes
less a hiss than a breathing, as if
the lost world resurfaced there.
Dark girl, pushing off with each high-laced boot.
Then the teeth, then the bone, then the mirroring ice.

Often I fished with my cormorant, Tom,
who would, through wing dips and shudders, identify
the schools. I remember the knots
on his tepid legs, where skin rippled up from the bone,
and the parallel pickets of his shoulders—
how their pivots found echoes
in my knuckles, when I plucked from the sleeve
a granule of ash.

 

 

When I opened the fish there were glimmers of
roe, which in turn I turned over
in my study of English: to the deer,
and some dark blemish in mahogany,
in the spill of its quartersawed grain.
How wind through the lips can create such a trio:
fish egg, and doe, and a dapple in wood!

 

From birth,
my legs held the pliancy of glass.
And shattered, finally, reducing my life to a hobble.
As a boy, rising up from the low chair, I felt
a shin bone buckle and split—a pain,
I assume, like the flare a mollusk must feel, dropped
in the boiling soup. Then the stunned mouth,
all in one motion, closing and opening.

 

As I fell, I saw in the polished grain of the table
the static figure: roe.

When I was insane, I earned my release
with a family of paintings. A circus. From memory.
Demanded from memory.
As if the functioning mind
is one that imagines
. There were gymnasts
and scarves. And once, on their sides
in a center ring, a woman and horse.

 

They lay facing each other like lovers, or
the twin lobes of the heart. At the sound of a whistle
each would roll over, roll away, the delicate
legs of the horse flailing a little, stroking the air,
the great body below gathering, shifting,
as a galaxy shifts in its black cabin.
Just before they turned over, each
to a separate world, there is a moment
captured in my painting, an instant,

 

when the shoe of the woman—its cloud of taffeta bow—
reaches out to the answering hoof of the horse.
Her foot—then, in the distance of
reflection, his: as if he, in some fashion,
were her magnificent extension,
and gave to her eyes what my cormorant saw,
as he entered himself in the passing waters.

With pen nib and glass, on a lozenge-sized leaf,
my husband has counted the two hundred thirty
plum-hued filaments of the sundew plant.

 

To his left, right, with equal attention,
our sons are sketching each shivering pedicel,
each sap-bloated gland. The coronal splay

 

of the filaments, their tendrils and curls,
the lateral braids of their journeys,
find echoes—just there on the side tables,

 

hearth board—in the rims of my father's vases.
We have always visited the soil.
The ink, the marl of it. And made with each piece

 

a kind of cessation. A pause. Like the moments
one enters in late afternoon, a field perhaps,
or that shadowy climate just west of the door,

 

when the world's noises suddenly stop—
no leaves, wind, no song birds. That hush,
that instant, before it all rushes on.

 

The cameo heads are the white of snow drifts.
And delicate, the bridge of a dowager's nose
like a hairline quiver on the inner eye . . .
I remember one March my father,
on a fractured mantle of snow, dragged us
by horseback through the moorland fields, a rope

 

from the saddle to my cousin's sleigh,
then backward to my brother's, then backward
to mine. Steam bloomed from our various mouths.

 

And the brittle spindles of new broom, the star-nubs
of heather, the young fern, springing back
through the snow as each rider passed over,

 

offered the sound of rice paper folding—
or better, unfolding. Two hands releasing
the gift of it. Such concentration. Such care.

 

 

Month after dry month, then suddenly
a brief rain has delivered to the fractured hillsides
a haze of grass. So sparse it might be
a figment of the heart. Yet its path
on the outstretched hand is true—brush and retreat—
like the breaths of a spaniel.

 

There are buried in the decks of certain ships
melon-sized prisms of glass, dangling their apices
to the cabins below. Through
their forked, pyramidic ziggings, daylight
is offered to the mess tables, to the tinware,
the gun-gray curlings of salt-tongue.
Not rainbowed at all, the light
approaches the face of each sailor
in segments, like the light in a spine of
train car windows. Then fuses, of course, when it
marries the retina, its chopped evolution

 

lost in the stasis of the visible.
We turn homeward soon. I remember
the seam lines of southern constellations, and the twin
tornadoes of a waterspout: one funnel
of wind reaching down from a cloud,
one funnel of sea reaching upward. They met
with the waist of an hourglass—in perfect reflection,
as we, through the Archer, the Scorpion, the Painter,
call forth from the evening some
celestial repetition of our shared churnings.

 

We shattered the spout
with shotguns that kicked like the guns of my childhood
when leaves were a prune-mulch and my sisters
stood at the rim of the orchard.
Katty. Caroline. Susan. Marianne.
In the temperate wind, their dresses and sashes,
the variegated strands of their hair, were
the nothing of woodsmoke. Steam.

 

I cannot foretell our conclusion.

 

But once, through a pleat-work of waves,
I watched as a cormorant caught and released
a single fish. Eight times. Trapped and released.
Diving into an absence, the fish
re-entered my vision in segments, arcing
through the pivot of the bird's beak. Magnificent,
I thought, each singular visit, each
chattering half-step from the sea.

 

 

 

 

 

I would find our family, he said, across
one building's southern wall,
where tandem trunks of windblown oak
arc toward hothouse limes
. . .