Flight: New and Selected Poems Read Free Page B

shanks,
the mules, centered and pushed—
    Â 
    and then it was all restored.
    Â 
    Soon the nut pines yielded to scrub pines, the wind
to the screams of the handcarts—
wooden axles, wooden wheel hubs,
day after day, the haunting, wooden voices.
    Â 
    Now and then, the lowland flashed up
through the trees, russet and gold-filled:
Ophir, Mineral Bar, the American River. Then
the scrub pines gave way to the black oaks, the wistful
manzanitas. On the bank of a river-fork
someone knelt, pinched the gravel,
plump and auriferous. Two others
talked of their journey, and the journey
of gold, of their last descent and that climbing:
fold-fault and lifting, erosion,
glaciation, explosion,
the magma and silica scratching upward,
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    pin-step by pin-step to meet them.
All night the rain washed over the wagons,
cut down through the wheel ruts and fire-pits,
the powdery topsoil, as if to say
Deeper, just a little deeper,
and in the morning, pulled up in the muzzles
of mules, dangling in the grassy root-tips,
that gold dust, that ending.

FROM Heart and Perimeter (1991)

The Shakers
    Picture a domino. A six perhaps, or placid
four. And resting upon it, like the grids in some
basement windows, three thin vertical lines.
This is a staff—for the dance notations of Rudolf Laban.
Torso twists, step turns and wrist folds,
gallops, jumps, all the motions
a body might make—in space, in time—
contractions, rotations, extensions, from head tilt
to the crook of the left thumb’s outer segment,
    Â 
    spatter the staff in symbols. Black dots
and miniature boxcars, tiny rakes
for the fingers, double crosses for the knees,
the right ear’s sickle, the eyebrow’s mottled palette,
each intricate sketch on its half inch of grid line—
until a string of speckled rectangles
    Â 
    might tell us a foot was lifted,
set down at a slant on the metatarsus,
as a man might step down a path of loose stones.
In the late-morning light, on the road to New Lebanon,
his elbow jumps with its bucket of lake bass.
Now and then, a whistle begins, spreads
into song, then the slack-cheeked slip into piety.
    Â 
    By midday his movements are rhythmic,
have become this dance passed down
through the centuries, then trapped in a patchwork
of labanotation. Two circles: one men, one women.
Stage left, a singer, a pulse of percussion.
The music begins and the circles are carriage wheels,
then closer—almost touching—are the black-specked wheels
of a gear: one men, one women, in turn almost
    Â 
    touching, then the arms flung up in denial,
the bodies flung back into rippling lines,
fused, yet solitary, like a shoal of lake bass.
If there were lanterns then, they are lost here,
and smoke, the odors of sawdust, linseed.
But the costumes are true—white bibs and transparent
skullcaps, each foot in its column of black boot—
    Â 
    and the dancers strive with an equal devotion,
as if the feat of exact repetition were a kind of
eternity. Black dots and miniature boxcars.
Step here, they say, just here. And a foot is lifted,
a quick smile answers, This is enough, this striving—
    Â 
    daylight as it is with its sudden rain,
all the pockets of loose stones glistening.

For the Sake of Retrieval
    As Whistler heard colors like a stretch of music—
long harmonies, violet to amber, double hummings of
silver, opal—so, in reverse, these three in their capsule,
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    free falling two hours through the black Atlantic, ears
popped, then filled with the music of Bach or Haydn,
might fashion a landscape. Low notes bring
a prairie perhaps, the sharps a smatter of flowers,
as the pip notes of sonar spring back to the screen
in little blossoms. They have come for the lost Titanic
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    and find instead, in the splayed beam of a headlamp,
silt fields, pale and singular, like the snow fields
of Newfoundland. On its one runner blade the capsule slides,
slips out through drift hummocks, through
stones the Ice Age glaciers dropped,