Linda Bierds

As Whistler heard colors like a stretch of music— long harmonies, violet to amber, double hummings of silver, opal—so, in reverse, these three in their capsule, free falling two hours through the black Atlantic, ears popped, then filled with the music of Bach or Haydn, might fashion a landscape. Low notes bring a prairie perhaps, the sharps a smatter of flowers, as the pip notes of sonar spring back to the screen in little blossoms. They have come for the lost Titanic and find instead, in the splayed beam of a headlamp, silt fields, pale and singluar, like the snow fields of Newfoundland.  On its one runner blade the capsule slides, slips out through drift hummocks, through stones the Ice Age glaciers dropped, its trail the foot-thin trail of a dancer, who plants, glides, at his head the flurry of a ship's chandelier, at his back a cinch-hook of icebergs cast down through the winds of Newfoundland. The music these three absorb stops with the wreckage, with words lipped up through a microphone: flange,windlass,capstan,hull plating, then oddly, syllables at a slant, as light might slant through window slats, stairsteps,doorknob,serving bowl,teacup,Bordeaux. Mechanical fingers, controlled by the strokes of a joy stick, brush over debris, lifting, replacing. In jittery strobe lights, camera lights, all colors ground down to a quiet palette, angles return, corners and spirals pull back to the human eye—as if from some iced and black-washed atmosphere, boiler coal, a footboard and platter, each common shape brightened, briefly held for the sake of retrieval. The current spins silt like a sudden storm. With the intricacy of a body the capsule adjusts, temperature, pressure. Someone coughs, then the three sit waiting, as in Whistler's Sad Sea three are waiting. All around them are dollops of winter wind, everywhere beach and sea. No horizon at all in this painting, just a grey/brown thrum beach to sea. How steady his breath must have been on the canvas, his hands on the brushstrokes of lap robes, of bonnets and beach chairs, the pull of a red umbrella: each simple shape loved and awash in the landscape.

Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic— back from bone the echoes stroke, back from the halved heart, the lungs three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills. From a leather chaise, the astronaut's withered legs dangle, as back they come, sounds a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape. The physician cocks his head and taps—exactly as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved and halved, until a roof appears, black as space. I'm gaining ground, he says, the astronaut, who knows, from space, earth is just a blue-green glow, a pilot light he circled once, lifted, swiftly flown above the rafters and atmospheres, half himself and half again some metamorphic click, extinct as memory. I'm gaining ground, he says, and back it comes, his glint of cloud-crossed world: a pilot light or swaddled leaf, green in the season's infancy.

1. In the windless late sunlight of August, my father set fire to a globe of twine. At his back, the harvested acres of bluegrass and timothy rippled. I watched from a shallow hill as the globe, chained to the flank of his pickup truck, galloped and bucked down a yellow row, arced at the fire trench, circled back, arced again, the flames behind sketching first a C , then closing to O —a word or wreath, a flapping, slack-based heart, gradually filling. To me at least. To the mare beside me, my father dragged a gleaming fence, some cinch-corral she might have known, the way the walls moved rhythmically, in and in. And to the crows, manic on the thermals? A crescent of their planet, gone to sudden sun. I watched one stutter past the fence line, then settle on a Hereford's tufted nape, as if to peck some safer grain, as if the red-cast back it rode contained no transformations. 2. A seepage, then, from the fire's edge: there and there, the russet flood of rabbits. Over the sounds of burning, their haunted calls began, shrill and wavering, as if their dormant voice strings had tightened into threads of glass. In an instant they were 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, 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— a thousand shades of white, I think. Eggshell, oyster, parchment, flax. 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— 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.