Free Flight: New and Selected Poems by Linda Bierds

gone—the rabbits,
their voices—over the fire trench,
into the fallows. My father walked
near the burn line, waved up to me, and from
that wave, or the rippled film of heat,
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    I remembered our porch in an August wind,
how he stepped through the weathered doorway,
his hand outstretched with some
book-pressed flower, orchid or lily, withered
to a parchment brown. Here, he said, but
as he spoke it atomized before us—
pulp and stem, the pollened tongue,
dreadful in the dancing air.

3.
    Scummed and boxcar thin,
six glass-walled houses stretched beside our fields.
Inside them, lilies, lilies—
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    a thousand shades of white, I think.
Eggshell, oyster, parchment, flax.
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    Far down the black-mulched beds, they seemed
ancestral to me, the fluted heads of
dowagers, their meaty, groping,
silent tongues. They seemed
    to form perspective’s chain:
cinder, bone, divinity . . .

4.
    My father waved. The crows set down.
By evening, our fields took the texture
of freshened clay, a sleek
and water-bloated sheen, although no water
rested there—just heat and ash
united in a slick mirage. I crossed the fence line,
circled closer, the grasses all around me
collapsing into tufts of smoke. Then as I bent
I saw the shapes, rows and rows of tougher stems—
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    brittle, black, metallic wisps, like something grown
to echo grass. The soot was warm,
the sky held smoke in a jaundiced wing,
and as a breeze crossed slowly through,
stems glowed—then ebbed—
consecutively. And so revealed a kind of path,
and then a kind of journey.

Depth of Field
    Specula. Gauze in a halo of disinfectant.
We sit in the small room, dimmed
by the X-ray of my father’s chest
and the screen’s anemic light. Because on film
the spots are dark, my mother asks
if, in the lung, they might be white: some
hopeless sense of the benign. My father smiles.
Outside the window, a winter storm
continues. Across the park, the bronze-cast generals
spur their anguished horses, each posture
fierce with rearing. Nostrils, lips, the lidless eyes.
Now all the flung-back heads have filled with snow.

After-Image
    Three weeks past my father’s death
his surgeons, in pond-green smocks, linger,
trail after me from dream to porch, down
the bark and needle pathway toward the river.
One nudges me, explains, as he did weeks ago,
the eye’s propensity for opposites, why green
displaced their bleached-white coats. Looking up
from the tablet of a patient’s blood, he says,
the red-filled retina will cast a green
on every white it crosses. A phantom wash
on a neighboring sleeve. It startles us,
he tells me. And: Green absorbs the ghosting.
Then he is gone, the path
returning to boot brush and the squirrel ratchets
my father loved. It is noon, the sky
through the tree limbs a sunless white.
I have come to watch the spawning salmon
stalled in the shallow pools. Age
has burned them a smoky red, though
their heads are silver, like helmets. Just over
the mossy floor, they float unsupported,
or supported by the air their gills have winnowed.
I think I will gather them soon, deep
in the eye, red and red and red,
then turn to the canopy of sky and cedars.
It will support them soon, the green.

Six in All
    Six
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    Behind my back, before my family, the elms
have flared, dropped leaves, regathered them in tiny buds.
Before me, behind my family, the limes are still,
drawn out through shades of darkening
by nothing more than light. Last night
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    I read a tracker’s lore, half truth, I think,
half wonderment—how, fleeing, one man mounted stilts,
another fastened to his soles the stiffened gnarls
of cows’ hooves. Such fussings over twists
in dust! But beauty, too, that one can read
a residue, that from the profile of a stride
a body might be crafted.
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    We’re faded now, my mother’s sleeve, my sister’s spidered
fists. For someone standing next to me,
we’re only hatchings on the glass,