Flight: New and Selected Poems by Linda Bierds

their grave felicity.
Mistaken for an onion, the bulb was roasted
near the Antwerp docks, then eaten with oil and vinegar.
Still new to the region, the others were buried in soil.
In Abraham’s early folios, South America blooms
from its western shore, articulating a shape
that has yet to appear, while in Bruegel’s dark painting,
a child on a hobbyhorse whips a flank of air.
Neither man lived to see, in 1650, at Nuremberg’s
Peace Fair and Jamboree, fifteen hundred boys
on their wooden horses, fifteen hundred beribboned manes.
Watched from the highest balconies, they filled the square
like tulips, some said. Like soldiers, said others.
Although none could be seen completely. At last, all agreed,
they gave to the square a muted, ghostly atmosphere,
like the moods in medieval tapestries
that hold in quiet harmony violence and a trellised rose—
although the sun that day was bright, all agreed,
and the wind splendid and clear, as it carried
the taps of those wooden hooves, and lifted
the ribbons this way and that, this way and that,
until night, like the earth, covered them.

Stroke
    To stroke from stone the hovering bee—
to release from marble its white thorax—the hand
must turn back on itself, palm up, fingers curved,
with the gesture of skipping stones over water.
And to sculpt the wings, the hand must arc downward,
fingers stiff, with the gesture of rubbing grief
from the brow. And so, Gianlorenzo Bernini learned,
carving bees for the Pope’s family shield, for the churches
and Roman fountains: palm up
in the workshop, palm up in the world; fingers stiff
on the chisel and brow; hand curved to the hammer,
hand curved to the wine glass; palms pressed
for the wafer, palm up for the thorax, the coin,
for the quick rains that washed from his skin
the decades of white dust.
    Â 
    To free Saint Teresa to her ecstasy, or Daphne
to her leafed future, the hand must know first
the promise of wax. Or graphite. Or the tepid flesh
of clay. The hand must know first
the model. These are the angles, Bernini said,
for the animate, human form: acute, obtuse,
salient, re-entering. Hour by passing hour,
his room filled with stone chips and ciphers,
the metallic scent of mathematics. Now and then,
a brief snow tempered his marble horses.
Now and then, migraine headaches made lace
of his world. These are the compasses, slipped
from their soft pouches. And these, the reflex angles
of their pivoting leg, when the hand, circling,
turns back on itself.
    To curry from stone the texture of silk, or feathers,
or the fluid parchment of bee wings, the hand
must pursue the source, must open to fullness
the brief wing, or the downward slope
of the lover’s robe, so that stone might turn back
on itself, might climb through the strata of bedrock
and centuries to echo the living—just as the living
climb down into stone. These are the hand strokes,
Bernini said: frontal, alee, emergent, re-entering.
For the climbing, shapes to their shaped reversals—
as, two days from his death, shapes would climb
through his right arm, through the long wick of his nerves:
little sparks, little Janus flames, lighting their own
departure. Then a thrum, he said. All through the flesh
that thrum. Bees. White bees.

Gregor Mendel and the Calico Caps
    With tweezers light as a pigeon’s beak,
I have clipped from each stamen a pollen-filled anther:
hour by hour, three hundred tiny beads, dropped
in my robe’s deep pocket, their yellow snuff
sealing the seam lines. And thus,
    Â 
    I emasculate peas that would sire themselves.
    Â 
    Heresy, some say,
to peel back the petal, sever the anther, stroke
to the open blossom—with the sweep of a pollen-tipped
paintbrush—another blossom’s heritage.
Heresy, to mingle seed
    Â 
    fixed in the swirl of the world’s first week.
    Â 
    Rest, now.
The bird-beak tweezers mute on my lap.
In France, where orchards yield to upswept Alps,
they have tied to the legs of