Flight: New and Selected Poems Read Online Free PDF

all sound resonates? . . .
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    A bell has fallen in Moscow, he once wrote,
so huge it carried its belfry to the ground .
And into the ground. The bell lip
and shoulder boring deep in the earth. Then
a cross-rip of belfry. Then, through
the stark reversal of summer grasses,
four pale steps leading down.

The Grandsire Bells
    At first quick glance and lingering second,
the five, sludge-smeared miners on the roadway—
through this pre-morning light, with their shock
of canary in its braided cage—
might have seemed to the five ringers approaching
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    like a portrait of memory, like the sway
and blear of themselves in memory: the bend
of bootsoles in the myrtle grass, black
caps, yellow lantern flame, the knapsack stings
of rhubarb and mildew. And the village
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    below, coal fires granting to the fresh day
plumes in the fashion of cypresses—base knot,
stalk, the splintering crown-tip—a kind
of memory also, as the ringers trudged
up the hillside, past the miners and smoke strings,
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    past the fluted iron churchyard fence, the dollops
of marble headstones. Then into the breezeway,
where belfry steps accepted the trudge,
and the bells, above, waited. Five. In a blend
of copper and tin, each shouldered the hub ring
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    of a great wheel, the bell ropes lashed to spokes
and threaded, the soft-tufted cordage
dangling down to the ringers like a spray
of air roots. With the motion of climbing
the treble was cocked, pulled up to suspend
■ ■ ■
    at the balance point, waist and mouth-edge
inverted, hovering. Then the others cocked,
turned up, each ton of fish scale-glistening
arc at rest of a pin-tip of stay.
And toppled. One after one, treble, second,
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    third, fourth, tenor, toppled. Quick pump and
spillage,
like heartbeats. Again, the ringers releasing
the strike and hum notes, handstroke to backstroke,
the bells pulled up, up, the snapping ropes wound
up, tail tufts and sally-grips in the jig-play
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    of dancers. All morning, the swinging
treble wound through its hunt path, a nudge
into second ring, third, fourth, and the second
replacing the tenor bell, and the third knocked
into lead. In the village the day
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    was a braiding of change-rings, notes swelling,
fading, as the bells turned. In the bracken
and mine shafts. In the foundry, when the forge
bellows hushed and the furnace tapway
spilled a rush of smoking bronze down bricklined troughs in the earth floor. Bell notes. When
bronze curled down through buried bell molds, cut
half-rings
in the earth, cut bell shapes. When the cupped clay
flared and stiffened. Bell notes. Change upon change.
Then ending. Ending. In an instant, closing back
    in their first order. All ringers for that second
claiming past, present, like walkers on a roadway:
in the half-light of morning, one shock
of canary in a braided cage,
one curve of lantern flame approaching.

FROM The Ghost Trio (1994)

The Winter: 1748
    Erasmus Darwin, 1731-1802
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    A little satin like wind at the door.
My mother slips past in great side hoops,
arced like the ears of elephants—
on her head a goat-white wig,
on her cheek a dollop of mole.
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    She has entered the evening, and I
her room with its hazel light.
Where her wig had rested is a leather head,
a stand, perfect in its shadow but
carrying in fact, where the face should be,
a swath of door. It cups
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    in its skull-curved closure
clay hair stays, a pouch of wig talc
that snows at random and lends to the table
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    a neck-shaped ring.
When I reach inside I am frosted,
my hand like a pond in winter, pale
fingers below of leaves or carp.
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    I have studied a painting from Holland,
where a village adjourns to a frozen river.
Skaters and sleighs, of course, but
ale tents, the musk of chestnuts,
someone thick on a chair with a lap robe.
I do not know what becomes of them
when the flow revisits. Or why
they have moved from their warm hearthstones
to settle there—except that one