Flight: New and Selected Poems by Linda Bierds Page B

opening slowly, and the matter inside
already building its new borders.
Two, then. Two lives. And how many sires—
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    Hans Spemann thinks—and how many heirs?
If only the path were brighter, and the lens
finer. If only the hand were surer
and the blade sharper, and firmer,
and without the glint of time . . .

Desires
    In autumn, 1879, on a day like today,
the physicist, Charles Vernon Boys,
touched to a spider’s quiet web a silver tuning fork,
its long A swimming a warp line, up and up.
The hour’s the same, the hemisphere,
and so the sunlight must have banked at this degree
across his buttoned sleeve, and the steady A
stroked a morning’s molecules
much like these—although the note I hear
is organ-cast, cathedral-bound, and the sleeve
this sunlight banks across
drapes in tempera from a saint’s clasped hands.
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    Godless in this god-filled room, I’m drawn less
to the saint’s sacrificial fate than to the way
like instruments vibrate sympathetically,
or how this painter’s ratio of bone to powdered umber
precisely captures a dove’s blunt beak. I’m drawn
to his abidingness, the hands that slowly milked
egg white from its yolk, and ground the madder root,
and shaved the gold, and sealed it all
in a varnish skin (although the skin’s a web now,
shot through with cracks).
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    Perhaps he whistled, low in his teeth,
a tuneless breath that dried the saint’s wet eye to matte.
Perhaps he scraped the iris back, and built
the ground, and scraped again, to make the light
interior (then varnished it, to make the light eternal).
Propped on a garden bench, a C-fork buzzed, Boys said,
whenever the A was struck. And the spider whirled.
    Then down a warp line, desire’s leggy shadow
rushed—and rushed—scraping its beak
on the silver mass, silking the tines,
convinced until the last, Boys said,
all that hummed was food.

Nineteen Thirty-four
    Radiant, in the Paris sun, the clustered chairs
and canopies, the clustered leaves, one and one
and one—and down the boulevard, the circus tent
in a blowsy park, the Hospital, boulangeries,
the Institute where Curie turns, then takes
in her blackened, slender fingers a finger-shaped
    Â 
    tube of radiation. And the blue Atlantic, radiant,
the American shore, the gold-flecked palette
Paul Cadmus lifts. It is a midday and sundown
in March. He will paint on the flank of an acrobat
a gilded skin. She will stroke down the test tube
a ticking wand. There is sunlight on their sleeves,
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    as the equinox shifts and the pale-bricked house
of Physics throws open its smallest doors. Radiant,
the boulevards and shorelines, the peat fields, polders,
steeple tops, the Appalachians, Pyrenees,
the river-etched terraces of Warsaw.
And the circus tent with its acrobats, stern-faced
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    and gilded, circling the ring on their parallel horses.
Radiant, their sudden shape, like fission’s sudden
pyramid: one on the shoulders of two, two
on the shoulders of four, four on the eight
pumping, glistening haunches, and the sixteen
polished hooves, mute in the swirling dust.

Vespers: Gregor Mendel and Steam
    Not plumes. Not plumes
from the teapot’s throat.
But force, unseen, the space
between plume and throat—pure steam,
a cleft near the porcelain throat.
Nightfall on the teacup, the window,
the breaths of the winter ewes.
Nightfall. Nightfall. Dark breach
between breath and ewe.
And what force, what force, now,
will carry our dormant souls?
Not breath. Not cloud.
Not plume. Not plume. Not
shape—Holy Father—but gap.

Sonnet Crown for Two Voices
    The glow, how can I express it? My god,
it lifts from protein flecks, up and across
this crafted lens. From flecks of nothingness,
enlarged twelve hundred times, its simple, cold
fluorescence lifts, green as early pea pods.
Like Mendel’s progeny, it blinks across
the vines of probability, the sap-glossed
spindle threads. How Gregor would have