Linda Bierds

In a wide hoop of lamplight, two children— a girl and her younger brother—jump marbles on a star-shaped playboard. Beside them, in a chair near a window, their father thinks of his mother, her recent death and the grief he is trying to gather. It is late October. The hooplight spreads from the family, through the window, to the edge of a small orchard, where a sudden frost has stripped the fruit leaves and only apples hang, heavy and still on the branches. The man looks from the window, down to a scrapbook of facts he is reading. The spider is proven to have memory, he says, and his son, once again, cocks his small face to the side, speaks a guttural oh, as if this is some riddle he is slowly approaching, as if this long hour, troubled with phrases and the queer turn in his father's voice, is offered as a riddle. There is the sound of marbles in their suck-hole journeys, and the skittery jump of the girl's shoe as she waits, embarrassed, for her father to stop, to return to his known self, thick and consistent as a family bread. But still he continues, plucking scraps from his old book, old diary of wonders: the vanishing borders of mourning paper, the ghostly shape in the candled egg, beak and eye etched clearly, a pin-scratch of claw. A little sleet scrapes at the window. The man blinks, sees his hand on the page as a boy's hand, sees his children bent over the playboard, with the careful pattern of their lives dropping softly away, like leaves in a sudden frost—how the marbles have stalled, heavy and still on their fingers, and after each phrase the guttural oh, and the left shoe jumping.

When the cow died by the green sapling, her limp udder splayed on the grass like something from the sea, we offered our words in their low calibrations— which was our fashion—then severed her horns with a pug-toothed blade and pounded them out to an amber transparency, two sheets that became, in their moth-wing haze, our parlor windows. They softened our guests with the gauze-light of the Scriptures, and rendered to us, on our merriest days, the sensation of gazing through the feet of a gander. In time we moved up to the status of glass—one pane, then two—each cupping in proof of its purity a dimple of fault, a form of distortion enhancing our image. We took the panes with us from cottage to cottage, moth-horn and glass, and wedged up the misfitted gaps with a poultice of gunny and wax. When woodsmoke darkened our bricks, we gave to the windowsills a lacquer of color—clear blue with a lattice of yellow: a primary entrance and exit for light. And often, walking home from the river and small cheese shop, we would squint their colors to a sapling green, and remember the hull of that early body, the slap of fear we suffered there, then the little wash of recovery that is our fashion—how we stroked to her bones a cadenced droning, and took back from her absence, our amber, half-literal method of sight.

Then the day passed into the evening, a sovereign, darkening blue. And the twenty-six lost miners, if living at all, knew nothing of the hour: not the languid canter of light, or the wind curled through the hedgerows. Not pain. Not rage. If living at all then just this: a worm of black water at the lower back. At the lungs two tablets of air. What is it like there? the broadcaster asked, his voice and the slow reply cast down through the time zones of America. A stillness. All of the families asleep in the fire station. And the mineworks pale on the landscape. What else? Nothing. Blue lights of police cars. What else? Nothing. Nothing? ...The thrum of the crickets. A thousand files on a thousand scrapers. A thousand taut membranes called mirrors amplifying the breed-song. A landscape of cupped wings amplifying the breed-song. A thousand bodies summoned to a thousand bodies—and the song itself a body, so in tune with the dusk's warmth it slows when a cloud passes over. Today. Tomorrow. In that May Nova Scotia darkness when the earth flared and collapsed. Before that May. After that darkness. On the larch bud. On the fire station. On shale and the grind-steps of magma. On the gold straining in its seam bed. On the coal straining. On the twenty-six headlamps swaying through the drift tunnels. On the bud. On the leaves, on the meadow grass, on the wickerwork of shrubs: dark cape of desire.

National Pigeon Association, England, 1940 Notch. Web. And then, down the shaft, lesser wing coverts and marginal coverts, and soft, greater underwing coverts — although never as great as greater under-primary coverts, gray-coated and down-plumped, trailing what might reveal a pattern just over the down that might support a secrecy. Launched from double-decker buses, or attic windows, or the dark roofs at Bletchley Park, the lesser pigeons, always first to find the fray, sport black metallic canisters strapped to matted lapel feathers. And tucked inside, like Russian dolls, a cipher’s hollow chambers — down and down, a Fibonacci spiral, a paper nautilus of words and codes and keys that shift with each decipherment. The bard is in the wand— read space as shape, read a as i— the key takes subterfuge, that doubling, double agency when tomfoolery is crossed with rage. But these are simply carriers, word-burdened, instinct- tossed, searching for the perch within a blasted atmosphere. Find forms, the message says, and everything will fall in line. The bird is in the wind

A little candlewax on the thumbnail, liquid at first, slipping, then stalled to an ice-hood. Another layer, another, and the child lies back, his thumb a hummock, his small knuckle buckled with cracks. No snow yet, but the last white meadows of switchwort and saxifrage mimic it. Already the bears brush back through the dwarf willows—Hubbart Point, Cape Henrietta Maria, the bay's deep arc flattening, lessening as land extends through the fast-ice and the seam of open leads stretches, withdraws. They have come for the pack floes, for the slow rafting. And repeat on their white faces, the boy thinks, the low strokes of the borealis: violet mouths, madder blue at the eyelids. Perhaps he will walk to the shoreline—no shore, of course, just miles of land-fast ice stretched over water, stretched out to water, the line where each begins a filament, a vapor. By then the bears will be sailors, or, far to the north, stalled in their waxy sleep. He yawns, looks down at his slipper, his floormat of braided fleece. By then the lights will be thicker, greens and magentas flashing, rolling in at times like fog.To go where nothing lives. He turns, settles. To extend a little breath out over that ice—the white, cumbersome bodies migrating in reverse with the others, dragging between them a lifeline, plump and intricate, like a net, like purse seiners dragging a cork net, its great arc spiraling, tighter, tighter, now green in those lights, now blue, now pink as the boy's ear, where all night a line of cold traces the rim, the lobe, circles down, chills, and recedes.

They darken. In the sky over Florence, the oblong clouds swell and darken. And hailstones lift back through the updrafts, thickening, darkening, until, swollen as bird eggs, they drop to the cobbled streets. Horses! the child Galileo thinks, then peeks through the doorway to the shock of ten thousand icy hooves. At his back, his father is tuning violins, and because there is nothing sharper at hand Galileo saws through a captured hailstone with a length of E-string, the white globe opening slowly, and the pattern inside already bleeding its frail borders. Layers and layers of ice— Like what? Onion pulp? Cypress rings? If only the room were colder, and the eye finer. If only the hand were faster, and the blade sharper, and firmer, and without a hint of song . . .

Snow everywhere, like the salt electrons jump from, as gas snaps and the tube hisses with light. I am holding just now the hooked underbeak of the great flamingo: cool glass, a little dusting of phosphor. Just off through the tree-line, the New Year waits with its bells, as in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel, stretched thirty feet up to the promenade deck, the back-kneed, S-necked mate waits with its own ringing, its soft, rattle-whistle of argon. What a pair they will make: ice-pink tubeworks north and south on the ballroom floor. And below: foxscarves, carnations, the pull and push of the long trombones. Flamingos! And now the moon pressing back through the tree-line. Close your eyes. Let us say we are children together, ten, perhaps twelve. I see neon: a steadfast landscape of DEPOT, HEIDELBERG, VACANCY. And you? Women in cardigans? A certain leaf tree? Perhaps the gleam of your dress shoe as you welcome the New Year. The ballroom is thick with smoke and laughter. Two birds, of course, north and south. Then the catch in your breath as an uncle explains the impact of vapor and salt, how a light that has never been curls up through the century—swank, incredibly still. Our times , he laughs, and in from the thin roadways all the WELCOMES, the PALMISTS and EXITS, all the boneworks blown to their plush, just bearable tones curl up to a wing and S-neck. High above you, cupped left, right on the ballroom floor, that ice-pink, still parenthesis. Then foxscarves. The flick of the black shoes.

Lines and phrases by Vladimir Nabokov, Alan Turing, and Thomas Hardy In    ...    the whitish muslin of a wide-mouthed net, in time of the breaking of nations, and in elementary arithmetic, the lichen-gray primaries keep in sufficiently close touch as to impose one part of a pattern onto another. The vibrational halo of the string figures passing from flower to flower, border to border — night-moths of measureless size, circling among the young, among the weak and old, hawk-moths at dusk hatching the war-adept in the mornings — the vibrational halo near the great wings is not the judgment-hour, only thin smoke without flame written on terrestrial things. I confess I do not believe in time. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness is an imitation game    ...    filled with the mysteries of mimicry    ...    But when a certain moth resembles a certain wasp and a deadly cipher flaps its glad green leaves like wings, what is our solution? Peace on earth and silence in the sky? I think that is not the faith and fire within us    ...    Still, I look into the depth of each breeding-cage, each floating-point form cleft into light and shade, hoping it might be so.

—Zelda Fitzgerald, 1939 Dear One, Do you have the time? Can you take the time? Can you make the time? To visit me? The hospital doors have opened to spring, and its land is high, dear one, each slope with a vapor of crocuses. Its citizens, alas, are low. Despondent, in fact, though a jar of sun tea tans on the sill. The woman beside me has opened the gift of a china doll, an antique Frozen Charlotte. Glass face, a cap of china hair, shellacked to the sheen of a chestnut. At breakfast the shifting returned, dreadful within me:colors were infinite, part of the air. . . lines were free of the masses they held. The melon, a cloud; and the melon, an empty, oval lariat. They have moved the canvas chair from the window. Sun, enhanced by the brewing jar, threw an apricot scorch on the fabric. The fruit, a cloud. The fruit, a doll-sized, empty lariat. D. O., into what shape will our shaplessness flow? Dear One, Italian escapes me. Still, I float to the operas of Hasse and Handel, a word now and then lifting through . . .sole,libertà. In an earlier time, the thrum-plumped voice of a countertenor—half male, half female—might place him among us, we who are thickened by fracturings. D. O., now and then, my words break free of the masses they hold. Think of wind, how it barks through the reeds of a dog's throat. How the pungent, meaty stream of it cracks into something like words—but not. I just sit in the sun room then, slumped in my fur and slabber, feeling the wolf begin, back away, then some great-jawed, prehistoric other begin, back away, then the gill-less, the gilled, then the first pulsed flecks begin, back away, until only a wind remains, vast and seamless. No earth, no heavens. No rise, no dip. No single flash of syllable that might be me. Or you. D. O., Now a gauze of snow on the crocuses! I woke to its first brilliance—midnight, great moon— and walked through the hallways. The pin-shaped leaves of the potted cosmos threw a netted shadow, and I stopped in its fragile harmony, my arms, bare feet, the folds of my limp gown striped by such weightless symmetry I might have been myself again. Through an open screen door I saw a patient, drawn out by the brightness perhaps, her naked body a ghastly white, her face a ghastly, frozen white, fixed in a bow-mouthed syncope, like something out of time. As we are, D. O., here in the Highland, time's infinite, cyclic now-and-then one simple flake of consciousness against the heated tongue. Dear One, My Italian improves: sole,libertà, and Dio, of course, D. O.! (Although He has forsaken me.) The tea at the window gleams like the flank of a chestnut horse. It darkens imperceptibly, as madness does, or dusk. All morning, I held a length of cotton twine— a shaggy, oakum filament— between the jar and brewing sun. We made a budding universe: the solar disc, the glassy globe of reddish sea, the stillness in the firmament. At last across the cotton twine a smoke began, a little ashless burn, Dio, that flared and died so suddenly its light has yet to reach me.

1. The Winter: 1748 —Erasmus Darwin, 1731-1802