Flight: New and Selected Poems by Linda Bierds Page A

pigeons
parchment memoranda—silk threads
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    encircling the flaccid skin, and a burl of words
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    that lifts between neighboring rooftops.
Twofold, I believe,
the gift of those gliding wings:
for the mind, script,
for the soul, the sluiced shape of the thermals,
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    at last made visible to the upturned eye . . .
    My fingers are weary. Snuff in the seam lines.
To ward off the breeze and the bee,
I have tied to each blossom a calico cap. Three hundred
calico caps. From afar in this late-day light,
they nod like parishioners in an open field,
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    murmuring, stumbling slightly through the green expanse,
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    as I, in my labors, am stumbling. And all of them
spaced, it appears, on the widening arc
of some grand design. Blossom and cap in some
grand design. Vessel and motion and the tinted threads.
Heresy? Have I not been placed on that widening path?
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    Am I not, in my calling, among them?

DNA
    At hand: the rounded shapes, cloud white, the scissors, sharp,
two dozen toothpick pegs, a vial of amber glue.
It’s February, Cambridge, 1953,
and he’s at play, James Watson: the cardboard shapes,
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    two dozen toothpick pegs, a vial of amber glue.
White hexagons, pentagons, peg-pierced at the corners—
he’s at play, James Watson, turning cardboard shapes
this way, that. And where is the star-shot elegance
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    when hexagons, pentagons, peg-pierced at the corners,
slip into their pliant, spiral-flung alignments?
Where is that star-shot elegance? This way? That?
He slips together lines of slender pegs that quickly
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    split in two. (Pliant, spiral-flung, one line meant
solitude. But one to one? Pristine redundancy.)
He slips. Together, lines of slender pegs quickly
conjugate. White hexagons, white pentagons:
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    not solitude but—one, two, one—pristine redundancy.
So close the spiral shape, now. Salt and sugar atoms
congregate: white hexagons, white pentagons.
So close the bud, the egg, the laboratory lamb,
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    the salt and sugar atoms’ spiral shape. So close—
it’s February, Cambridge, 1953—
the blossom, egg, the salutary lamb. So close
at hand, the rounded shapes—cloud white—the scissors—sharp.

Questions of Replication: The Brittle-Star
    Why now, under seven fathoms of sea,
with sunlight just a sheen on its carapace
and someone’s dark paddle stroking above?
Why, at this moment, does it lift from the reef
its serrated jaws, its four, undulant,
tendril arms—the fifth atomized
by a predator’s nudge—to begin
the body’s slow unbuckling? Near the reef,
a kick-dust of plankton hovers. And eelgrass.
And far down the sea floor, the true starfish
in their dank, illegible constellations.
What salt-rich analgesic allows
this self-division, as the disc parts
and tendril arms, each with a thousand
calcite eyes, sway into slender helixes?
Half disc and half disc. Limb pair; limb pair.
Two thousand eyes; two thousand crystal eyes—
that must notice now the emergent other,
aslant but familiar, slowly swimming away:
its butterflied, genetic list, its tendency
toward luminescence. Limb over limb,
where is it headed? And when will its absence
echo, adrift in the sea’s new weight?
Half shape; half shape—how far will it stroke
before loss, like daylight, lessens,
and the one that remains twines its optic arms
to look to the self for completion?

Redux
    They darken. In the ponds and springs near Stuttgart,
the oblong newt eggs swell and darken, cells
and their daughters, afloat in a cytoplasmic bath,
splitting, re-splitting, until, swollen to fullness,
they stroke through the brimming world.
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    Milkweed, the scientist, Hans Spemann, thinks,
then peers through a microscope’s steady beam
to a shoal of landlocked seeds.
At his back, his newborn stirs in a wicker pram.
And because there is nothing softer at hand
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    Spemann saws through a two-celled newt egg
with a length of the infant’s hair,
the plump globe