Read Flight: New and Selected Poems for Free Online

harp.
Great pipe shapes. Ladles. Just a coolness in the palm,
then a warmth. Or lined up on the tabletop,
an orchestra of reversals, sucking sound
back in, bell to a pucker of mouthpiece.
    A wind has begun in the clear day.
And perhaps they were spirits, there on the deck boards,
a ghostly trio lifting before him—no land
in sight, then his small body so suddenly
his body, so suddenly himself, the hands,
the feet in their soft shoes.
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    Now a child is standing in the open doorway,
the smallest of ear trumpets shining in his hand:
its perfect walls, the perfect, cupped vessel of it.
Look, he is mouthing, what
has risen from the earth to meet you.

Phantom Pain
    Josiah Wedgwood, 1795
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    It speaks, now and then.
A lisp at the knee. A needle-trill
where the ankle once arced. Then I reach into air
or the concave disturbance of the bedclothes.
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    And nothing. A pain in an absence. A leg-shaped
absence in pain. I do not know
what it is that calls—
and burns then, unsummoned, like the summer fires
that flame through the bracken.
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    A low cloud blackens the larch trees.
We have opened the channel through Harecastle Hill
and the vases and flake-white medallions
float down its dark tunnel, the canal boats
slender as fingerlings. No tow path
exists there and the workers must
leg the boats through: propped on their backs
on the cabin rooftops
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    must stride down that starless ceiling,
not advancing at all, but
advancing all, walking the eggshell jasper bodies
through the dripping darkness.
They tell me the day draws nearer like a lantern,
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    like the day must arrive
for the climbing colliers: a whiteness
coming closer—but then, as if on the pond
of the inner eye,
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    the intricate, inverted brilliance of a maple.
A glimpse into heaven, perhaps, or its loss,
the image flicked upright in the questioning mind—
in an instant, already gone
even as it approaches, a form
flaring nearer while backing away.

The Swallows: 1800
    Through the wet and continual trout-chill of earth,
he dropped with his father, past shale beds, black-slush,
down corridors greased with the seeping of springs,
and cranked in the darkness a stuttering flint wheel,
a wand that threw to the pickax and mine walls
quick jitters of light. The sparks left the wheel
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    in fractured arcs and brought from the darkness
oil slicks, water cans, now and then, a canary
in a wash of anthracite dust, each image
at once arriving, departing, at once
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    summoned, extinguished. When gasses crept out
through the drift tunnels, the sparks would thicken,
loll at the wheel, flush to the color of rubies, liver,
and be, it seemed, not fire at all, but a wreath
of some alternate element. And before he ran,
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    pushed by his father—and the other boys
ran with their fathers, calling through the corridors—
he watched at the flint wheel the stopped body
of light, how sparks could be stopped in the shapes
of their bodies, held there, it seemed, forever.
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    Middays they rested, the axes, the guttural rasps
of the flint wheels, silent. And his father told him
of legends, once of the sparrows of northern nations,
how they gathered by ponds in autumn, joined in a circle
wing to wing, foot to foot, and slowly sank into
the water. How they waited together through winter,
long ice pallets forming above them. And the villagers
stooped on the shoreline, watched through the ice
the chestnut bodies, silent in their still circle.
And waited for spring and the sudden rising,
the small birds breaking together to the yellow day.
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    But how could they eat there? he asked his father.
And breathe, with the water pressed over them?
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    They stopped, then began again with their rising.
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    In a wreath? As a single body they rose?
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    That is the story, his father said. Though
we think they rose as sparks.

Hunter
    Plume-shaped and pampered, the flames
at the sitting room hearth are the color
of foxes: sharp amber
dropping down to a