Flight: New and Selected Poems Read Free

just a deal and chestnut funnel tapered down to a corpse: Aris Kindt. Quiver-maker. One necklace of rope-lace curled under his ears—while over his body, the shadow of a painter’s hat circles, re-circles, like a moth at a candle.
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    So this is fresh death, its small, individual teeth.
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    Rembrandt walks past the breechcloth, then the forearm
soon to split to a stalk that would be grotesque
but for its radiance: rhubarb tendons
on a backdrop of winter. He swallows,
feels the small dimplings of lunch pork
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    drop away. And here will be Tulp,
his tweezers and white ruff. And here,
perhaps Hartman, perhaps the shadow of
a violet sleeve closing over the death-face.
It is commissioned: eight faces
forever immortal, and one—slightly waxen—
locked in mortality! He smiles.
How perfect the ears, and the pale eyelids
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    drawn up from the sockets
like the innerlids of pheasants. Just outside a window,
the day has climbed down to the amber color
of this candlelit room. Rembrandt turns,
crosses out past the sponges and vessels.
There is the sputter of wagon wheels through a fresh ice,
and in all the storefronts
torches hang waiting for a pageant—
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    scarlet blossoms for a new spring.
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    His room has turned cold with the slow evening.
Far off in a corner
is a canvas clogged with the glue-skin of rabbits—a wash
of burnt umber, and the whites
built up, layer by layer.
Now a fire, the odor of beets.
And here, where the whites buckle, will be Tulp,
perhaps Mathys, their stunned
contemplation of death. He touches a spoon,
    then a curve of plump bread. All across his shoulders
and into his hairline winds a little chill,
thin and infinite, like a thread-path
through the stars:
there will be umber
and madder root, yellow ocher, bone-black,
the scorch of sulfur, from
the oils of walnut and linseed—all things of the earth—
that forearm, that perfect ear.

Zuni Potter: Drawing the Heartline
    Through the scratch-strokes of piñon, the hissing
arroyos, through the clamped earth
waxed and swollen,
coil to coil, paddle to anvil,
the bowl on her palm-skin blossoms,
the bowl on her lap
blossoms, the lap blossoms
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    in its biscuit of bones.
Bract-flower, weightless, in the pock and shimmer
of August, she slopes from the plumegrass like
plumegrass. And the white skull
bobbles and turns. The gingerroot fingers
turn. Through the cocked mouth
of a buck deer, she sketches an arrow,
its round path nostril to heart.
For the breath going in.
For the breath going out.
Wind to heartbeat. The blossoms of steam.

Wedding
    from the painting by Jan van Eyck
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    Wait. The groom stops,
right hand in mid-air, mid-ceremony,
about to descend to the cupped right hand
of the bride. What is that noise?
At their feet, the ice-gray griffin terrier stops.
Two puff-shouldered witnesses just entering
the chamber, just entering the scene
through the iris of a convex mirror,
stop. And follow a curling sight-path
from the elegant to the natural: from the dangling
aspergillum and single ceiling candle, down,
past the groom’s velvet great-hat, his Bordeaux robe,
past the stiff-tailed lapdog, the empty
crow-toed wooden sandals, to
a trail of yellow apples—desk, ledge, windowsill
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    and out. There. Below. It is
the rasp of water casks on the hunt mares, squeezed
stave pin to stave pin, as
they are shouldered across the canal bridge. And the mares—
how brilliant in the high sunlight:
one roan, one walnut, eight legs
and the rippling ankles rippling again
where the slow Zwin passes under. In a moment
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    they will cross, step on with their small cargoes
past inns, the great cloth halls steaming with linens.
The mudflats have dried now. All their patterns
of fissures and burls like the rim
of a painter’s palette. Once or twice
the cones of yellow flax straw will flicker,
the autumn birch leaves flicker,
the mares lurch left, then
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    right themselves—nothing to fear after all: not