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

waiting to step forth
in another’s image—the hat plume and cloak,
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    after his likeness, the footfalls and trembling. Waiting,
with his grace, to make their turn,
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    while deep in the dawn’s new day, a little
circle of darkness draws a heart-high bead
and the beasts of the fields stand steaming.

The Last Castrato
    1904
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    Buoyed by light, the gaping, bronze recording horn
floats near his upturned face, near his lips
that echo in their opaque sheen
the wax now turning at the horn’s slim tip.
He is offering Hasse’s aria—pale suns in the misty heavens,
the tremblings, the hearts. But the stylus slips
on the low notes and fricatives until only
something like emblem remains, a pale, une’en art
etching the cylinder’s tranquil curl. And so
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    he is asked to compromise: the lowered tongue, the softened
voice, a forfeiture for permanence. But compromise
has brought him here. And softening. And permanence
has poured its liquid bronze into the gap
the temporary held so steadfastly. He steps away, steps
back. What on earth to do? Encircle loss, finite
and full-throated, as the stylus drops his highs and lows,
his suns and heavens, his seamless climbs from heart to mist?
Or forfeit loss and, so, be saved?

Testament: Vermeer in December
    To my daughter, Elsbeth, two loaf-sized, secret coffers.
To my sons, the pastel seascape.
And the peat chest. And the Spanish chairs, perhaps.
And the ivory-capped cane at rest on my bedstead.
And the sheets, and the ear cushions,
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    and the seventeen pocket handkerchiefs
that flap at the summons of each dawn’s catarrh.
Now and then, through their linen expanse
I revisit my children, in flight down an iced stream,
their sail-pushed sleds clicking, clicking
like a covey of walnut carts. . . .
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    To my servant, Bass Viol with Skull.
The wicker cradle. The ash-gray travel mantle.
To the men who will carry my coffin,
glass flasks—six—and a marbled flute
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    carved from the wing bone of a mute swan.
Its music may offer a tremoloed solace
as they lift from the gravesite my infant son.
Two years in the earth, his wooden box, darkened
by marl and a bleeding silt, will ride
my greater other like a black topknot
as we are lowered in tandem down the candlelit walls.
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    To my wife, the yellow jacket, silk and fur-trimmed,
that warms, through the mirror of a linseed wash,
a hazel-haired woman eternally lit by a pearl necklace.
She carries, with a dabble of madder and burnt ocher,
the wistful, enigmatic gaze of my children
    as they circled the pale flute, dreaming they said of some
haunted voice, deep in a gliding wing, its song
both shrill and melodic,
like the cry of an infant controlled by a choir.
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    And to you, in half-rings around me, your faces
spaced like pearls . . . imagine that moment
when the ropes are lowered and something begins
on the lit walls, shape over shape: I leave it to you,
that shadowed conjunction of matter and light
that flies, in its fashion, between us.

The Magic Mountain
    To sit on a balcony, fattened by lap robes and a fur pouch,
with the columbines nodding in their earthen pots
and the weighted autumn moon
already casting to the balustrade
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    a rim of tepid frost, is to know to the bones
the crepuscular slumber of bats—
alit between seasons of dawn and day, day and dusk,
and everything turning, perpetually. . . .
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    This evening’s soup was studded with cloves—
brown pods and corollas—the diminutive heads of
sunflowers.
To my left, in a neighboring balcony window,
a young man is dying, face turned to the ceiling,
his red chin beard sparse and pointed. He is joined
by a woman with a parchment fan, although I see only
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    her hand and cuff, the curve of a damask sleeve.
And a sky of rootless willows, gray, yellow-green,
pleated in parchment, swaying a little as the hand sways,
folding at last to a single stem. And then a sleight
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    of magic comes: from