Read Flight: New and Selected Poems for Free Online Page A

sobering port.
It is evening. A boy, Charles Darwin,
having listened as the undertaker’s workfellows
removed from the sickroom the body of his mother—
a little satin like wind at the door—
    Â 
    turns now to his father’s voice.
A story: the magnificent ears of musicians.
The young Beethoven, perhaps. How,
from the blindness of a sleeping mask,
he distinguished for his gathered diners
the clacket of forks from the clacket of knives.
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    A quick rain has begun at the window.
And now the story veers: An uncle once drowned
in the Derwent River, once walked through a night storm
to the storm of the current. And as the water
rises, as his father’s voice
approaches this alternate loss,
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    Charles studies the flames until they are foxes,
until they are called from the covert,
their sharp scent firm on the kale. Red coats
and the watery breeches. Black boots. And the ears
of the horses are cropped back to walnuts,
nubbled and sore—the long foreheads
just sloping away, sloping,
and the great eyes stark in their sockets.
    A music begins then: deep bay
upon deepening bay, the loping hounds
dark and harmonic . . .
And could the uncle distinguish, his father is asking,
the drops of the storm from the drops
of the river? Just then, with his face
half hidden, half blossoming?
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    And could Charles distinguish, there in the wing chair,
grief from the story of grief? Or fear? Or love
from the story of love? And turn to it—
the grief, the love—harbor it,
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    however the story might buffer, whatever the loss?
As the man who stands in a yellow field
and takes to his lips a silent whistle,
and accepts that a sound is traveling, just over
the kale, just over the wind, and accepts
his place in some seamless extension,
even as, in a wave, the singing animal world
turns back to him.

Held
    Silent, in the loose-fisted grip
of evening, he sits with his infant daughter
and makes from his face an exaggerated mask,
sorrow or glee, shock, the eyebrows launched
toward the hairline, the trenches of the forehead
darkening, so that she might learn—
following, mimicking—not only correspondence,
but a salvaging empathy.
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    And often in the chambers and drift tunnels
he gestures with the other miners. Deafened
by the strokes of the widow drills, he
offers that mime-talk, clear as the bell codes
for hoist, for lower. Cheeks drawn, the mouth
a tapered egg. Then he turns
    Â 
    in the lamplight, sees the tunnels
gauzed over with dust, feels
his lungs slowly filling, like the gradual
filling of rain ponds, and presses
the widow drill—named for his absence—
through the blue-black petals of anthracite,
through the bones and root-tips,
the shale-brindled cradle of the dead
and the flowering, as the earth
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    of the earth breaks away. Three thousand feet.
Four. His lungs slowly filling. But perhaps I am
spared, he wonders. Perhaps I am held
by this alternate world, cupped
■ ■ ■
    and eternal. As once, just a boy, he stood
with his mother in the bath light.
Her white slip, the twin pallets
of her earrings. A fog of talcum
turned at the mirror. In joy
she delivered its snow to the air,
shake upon shake, smiling,
drawing from his own small mouth
the stunned, obedient smile of a guest.
Her face. Her arm in its little arc.
As if she were saying This
is the gesture for always as
the weightless powder settled upon them.

Westray: 1992
    Then the day passed into the evening,
a sovereign, darkening blue. And
the twenty-six lost miners,
if living at all, knew nothing of the hour:
not the languid canter
of light, or the wind
curled through the hedgerows. Not pain.
Not rage. If living at all then
just this: a worm of black water
at the lower back. At the lungs
two tablets of air.
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    What is it like there? the broadcaster asked,
his voice and the slow reply
cast down through the time zones of America.
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    A stillness. All of the families
asleep in the fire station.
And the mineworks