Free Flight: New and Selected Poems by Linda Bierds Page A

like
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    hairline prints the heron leaves,
its tracks across the sandy bank first shallow—here—
then deeper as a fish was snared, then deeper still
as, taking flight, it most was wedded to the ground.
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    But I’ve described a positive, the darkened prints
across the glass. In fact these hatch-lined negatives
echo what was pale in us. And if the bird had truly walked
in tandem with my family’s path, its tracks
would yield a vacancy, like whitened lashes
of the dead. In this inert, inverted world,
what most engaged the passing light tumbled first
to nothingness. My father lifts a brier pipe,
a soot-black bulb reversed to ice.
The stem, the bowl, the mouthpiece gone.
It is his smoke that lingers.

FROM The Seconds (2001)

The Seconds
    Claude Laurent, glassblower, 1850
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    With a flurry of sidestrokes, the March wind
swims down the chimney, its air chafed
by hearth smoke and bacon. It is sunset,
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    and high on the inglenook shelf,
a gauze of crystal flutes
captures the lamplight. I am their maker—Laurent—
eased back in a soft chair, listening
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    to hearth logs sag through the andirons.
And thinking of seconds—first time, of course, then
the hapless devoted who step from behind
with their handkerchiefs and swords, ready to give shape
to another’s passion, as a body gives shape to a soul.
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    When the handkerchief crosses the damp grass,
they must wish it all back, the seconds:
that the handkerchief rise,
flap back to the hand, and the passion
pull back to its source, as the sword and the pistol
pull back to their sheaths.
Then everything silent, drawn in by some vast,
improbable vacuum—
as an orchestra of ear trumpets might silence a room!
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    Now the wall clock taps. Across my knees
the house cat casts her rhythmic thrum.
Once I lifted a flute, some second
blemished by a loll in the lime, and blew
through its crystal body a column of pipe smoke.
I remember its hover just over my chest,
a feral cloud
drawn down and bordered, it seemed
in that evening light, not by glass
but by itself.
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    Seconds and smoke . . .
Into what shape will our shapelessness flow?
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    Outside my window,
two children bob in the late light,
walking with their mother on the furrowed fields.
They love how their shadows
are sliced by the troughs—how, over the turned rows,
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    their darkened, elongated shapes
rush just ahead in segments, waving
their fractured sleeves. Now their mother
is laughing, lifting her arms and pale boot,
watching her sliced and rippled
shadow—whose parallel is earth, not she,
whose shape is taken not by her, but the cyclic light
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    her shape displaces. Now her head,
now her shoulder,
now the drop of her long coat
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    have stretched to some infinite black bay
pierced by the strokes of a black swan.

“Will You Walk in the Fields with Me?”
    Early dueling challenge
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    They are matted with frost
and a porous cloth that is the season’s first snow.
The fields. The seconds.
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    And the firsts, of course, their manored lords.
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    Seen from above in the dawn light, the burgundy,
snow-dappled cloaks of the lords
are two cardinal points of a compass,
its jittery needle defined
by the segmented footprints of sixteen paces.
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    It is the moment after turning. No one has fallen,
one bullet passing through a hat brim, the other
entering a birch tree with the sound
of a hoof through shallow ice.
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    At their fixed points, the lords wait. Winter wind
sails through their cloaks. They have entered the dawn
carrying no more than a sense of self, the magnetic pull
of decorum, and stand now, smiling a little,
satisfaction obtained by a hat brim,
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    by a birch that shivers in the early light, as
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    the seconds do, stomping in place in the snow.
They have entered the dawn carrying, in fact,
two bladders of salve, tourniquets browned
by an aging sun. No selves at all, they
are empty, waiting to be called,