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

step
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    is a method of gliding,
the self for those moments
weightless and preened as my leather companion.
And I do not know if the fish there
have frozen, or wait in some stasis
like flowers. Perhaps they are stunned
by the strange heaven—dotted with
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    boot soles and chair legs—
and are slumped on the mud-rich bottom,
waiting through time for a kind of shimmer,
an image perhaps, something
known and familiar, something
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    rushing above in their own likeness,
silver and blade-thin at the rim of the world.

Memento of the Hours
    First the path stones, then the shadow,
then, in a circuit of gorse and mint,
the room with a brook running under it.
It freshened the milk, the cream that grew
in its flat habit a shallow lacquer,
a veil I tested on slow afternoons
with a speckle of pepper.
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    There was butter, cheddar, the waxy pleats
of squash, green as a storm pond.
Walnuts. Three families of apple,
each with its circle of core fringe.
And the sheen on the walls
was perpetual, like the sheen
on the human body.
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    My mother would sit with me there,
her drawstring reticule
convex with scent jars and marzipan, the burled
shapes of the hidden. Once she brought her cut
flowers to chill until evening, and told me
the mouths of the bluebells
gave from their nectar a syrup elixir.
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    It holds in suspension the voices of choirboys,
she said. A dram of postponement.
And I felt as she spoke their presence
among us: the hum
of the brook just under our feet,
    the mineral hush of the plenitude,
then the blackened robes of the blackberry vines
gradually filling the door.

Windows
    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.

The Reversals
    Grit metals drawn to a bourbony syrup,
then the tiny ear trumpet is cast: hand-sized
cornucopia, one tendril of head band.
And the child who has followed this process, pickax
to flame, to the small, curved swelling in his day-pouch,
steps off on a mission to the faltering Beethoven,
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    just as the other, housebound, in a chaos of music sheets
and chamber pots, steps back through his mind
toward Holland. Late autumn. And by noon,
the ice on the deck rails is a lacework of gull prints.
There are waves, unbroken, rolling port to starboard
like a hammock wind. Deep cold. His hands
are made warm by a wrapping of scarf, his feet
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    by the black drapery of his mother’s lap.
Through his frost-fed and wave-rocked drowse,
three nuns on the deck are a gaggle of sea birds,
the arced wings of their huge headpieces
lifting their slender bodies. . . .
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    Music sheets. Chamber pots. One beckoning
metronome. And the ear trumpets
send off through his nerves
the sensations of a rake scraped over a