Flight: New and Selected Poems Read Online Free PDF Page A

journeys down game paths
to the white, forest blossoms of snake-root.
Bud high with poison, the vine plants rushed,
muzzle, to milk vein, to udder, to a thirst
whose final magnification seems a form of mockery.
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    An ax claps somewhere to her left. The table
with its belly of puncheon casts the shadow of a ferry,
as if the floor were again the flat Ohio,
Kentucky behind, Indiana just ahead in a chaos of trees.
Someone coughed then, she remembers. Sharp coughs,
skittering. Someone sang of the journey the soul
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    must make, little boat over water. Their home
took the color of chestnuts. She read aloud
from the fables of Aesop: foxes and eagles. The crow
and the pitcher—its water out of reach,
just off from the tongue, his beak at the rim
    like ax strokes. To her left they are chopping,
then whittling a clearing with fire. They are stacking
ripped vines, saplings, and underbrush
like a plump wreath at the base of a sycamore.
It will burn in an arc-shaped heart, huge
and magnificent, dark veins of heat
ripping off at the edges. Will the birds break again then,
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    out from the trees? The passenger pigeons and parakeets
lift as they have in a thick unit, their thousand bodies
dragging the shadow of a wide pond
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    down over the game paths, down over the oak trees
and cattle, the doorframe, bedposts, cupped hands,
bellows, the cheese in its muslin napkin?
Until shape after darkened shape floats in a wash of air?
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    Thirst. Braiding every thought back to an absence.
She drinks from her cup. Drinks again. On a hillside
the children are laughing, called out from their sorrow
by the spectacle of flames. Or by birds
in a sudden jumble, perhaps. Or the placid cows
catching handkerchiefs of ash on their broad faces.
How simply two circles can yield to each other,
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    curl back to each other without ending:
raised shoulder, a dipping, raised hip.
The path an oar makes in water, in air, then in water.

Träumerei
    All I have done in music seems a dream
I can almost imagine to have been real.
    ROBERT SCHUMANN, 1810-1856
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    Perhaps this, then: the holystone licks
of the winter Rhine. A cleansing.
A scouring away. Anything to free him
from the constant filling.
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    Weeping, in slippers and dark robe, maddened
by phantom voices, music,
he walks from his house with
the tentative half-steps of a pheasant.
A little rain collects on his robe hem,
and street meal, the cubiform dust-chips
of cobblestones. He has carried no coin purse
and offers to the bridge guard
a silk face cloth, then the image
of a man in bedclothes, in the quarter-arc of flight
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    from raining to river.
There is wind—upward—
and the parallel slaps of his slippers.
With the abrupt closure of a trumpet mute
his heart stops. Then the music, voices. Water
has flushed through his robe sleeves, and
the thin, peppered trenches
between groin and thigh.
    He will surface
as an opal surfaces: one
round-shouldered curve of brocade in the wave-chop.
Then his heart kicking back.
And the oarlocks of rowers who are
dipping to save him?
A-notes and A-notes—perfect—in unison.
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    What else but to starve?
The starched coats of asylum guards
give a fife’s chirrups. They are joined by
tintinnabulum, chorus, and oboe
on his brief walks to the ice baths.
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    At the first flat shocks and frigid clearings
he smiles, murmurs
that his madness is at least his love,
distorted, of course, pervasive, but still . . .
aural . A music. The trees
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    by the fenceline fill, release. One year,
two. He follows halfway, taking
into the self the quarter-notes of
footsteps, the cacophony of laughter, wagons, doors,
the hums of the candle-snuff.
Writing stops, then speech. No word,
no flagged dot on its spidery stave
to diminish the filling. What else but
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    to turn from all food, to decrease from without
like the August peaches? To take at the last
the fine, unwavering balance
of an arc—heart and perimeter—
a cup where