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

pale on the landscape.
    Â 
    What else?
Nothing. Blue lights of police cars.
    Â 
    What else?
Nothing.
Nothing?
. . . The thrum of the crickets.
    A thousand files on a thousand scrapers.
A thousand taut membranes called mirrors
amplifying the breed-song. A landscape of cupped wings
amplifying the breed-song. A thousand bodies
summoned to a thousand bodies—and the song itself a body,
so in tune with the dusk’s warmth
it slows when a cloud passes over.
Today. Tomorrow. In that May Nova Scotia darkness
when the earth flared and collapsed.
Before that May. After that darkness.
On the larch bud. On the fire station.
On shale and the grind-steps of magma.
On the gold straining in its seam bed.
On the coal straining. On the twenty-six headlamps
swaying through the drift tunnels. On the bud.
On the leaves, on the meadow grass,
on the wickerwork of shrubs:
dark cape of desire.

Desire

1.
    Where the Stillaguamish River cuts down
through the mountains, winds under the summits
of Forgotten and Sperry, of Vesper and Morning Star,
    Â 
    six miners have stepped from their darkened tunnels—
the ore carts stopped on their aerial tramway, the silver
at rest in the spines of railcars. It is a night
    Â 
    of a closer century. Their headlamps dapple
the clearing they cross. Now a robe of bats,
migrating westward, calls them to question
the black sky. And their headlamps lift,
all in one motion, one full beam lighting
the wings, the small, unwavering heads.

2.
    My father sat in a sunlit chair
and watched the field birds near the Stillaguamish.
He had on his chest, like a bandage, a small
nitroglycerin patch, and on his wrist, like
another bandage, the untanned shadow
of his watch. The birds turned
in the blossoming bulb fields, and Look,
he said, how the leader retrieves them, drawing
them with him in a single stroke, how
the white stomachs flash in unison
as the flock, in unison, rises and dips.

3.
    When I was a girl, we followed the river
to its exit in the port, then the port
to the open sea. I would wake with my family
to the sound of two horses, their hoofs on the boardwalk
near our cabin window, and the lumber bolts
    Â 
    clinking like bells. The boardwalk spilled down
to an outsweep of beach, where the horses
were anchored to a purse seine net. I remember
their list as they walked to each other,
dragging the net to its plump conclusion,
    Â 
    all the herring and candlefish, the junk fish,
the wayward salmon, turning together, flashing
together in the early sun. And although
    Â 
    we knew they traveled to us
by a net of our own making,
still we stood spellbound in their unified light.

Flood
    In that gill-light of late autumn evenings,
the valley children had crept through the corn rows,
two miles of withering tassels, styles, of leaves
cocked like the flaps of a fool’s cap—had crawled
from the gap of the access lane, out
down the rabbit paths, lanky, long-abandoned stalks
the perfect maze. We were parked by the roadside.
Six cars, seven. To the west, the wide
Stillaguamish River swelled to a bay.
Far behind us, the children in the cornfields stood—
no hood, no grit-dusted cap breaching the tassel line—
stepped left, some right—just a ripple, just
a ribbon in the stalks—turned, turned again,
the chirrup of their voices thickening, darkening,
until the quick fear they courted flared and stung
and someone on a step ladder—mother, uncle—
swung a cowbell in a beckoning arc
    Â 
    and homed them all. We were parked by the roadside.
Coffee, the crackle of short-waves. To the west,
the wide Stillaguamish reached over the stop signs,
reached into the eaves of outbuildings, saddles
and private treasures glistening, lifting,
dollops of burlap like jackets in the waves.
On a table-sized island, two Guernseys turned
in a thicket of snowberry, muzzle to tail. As their hoarse
voices collapsed into the brays, the wild rain began,
resumed. Water to water. And across the surface
of this new