On Linda Bierds
Jeff Encke
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On Linda Bierds Jeff Encke |
Unwinding the Given
“Space
and time are now dynamic quantities,” Stephen Hawking
writes in A Brief History of Time,
“when a body moves, or a force acts, it affects the curvature of space and
time.” Through her repeated attempts at unifying the theories of general
relativity and quantum poetics, Linda Bierds
has become our premiere verbal portraitist of the space-time continuum, tracing
the fine lines of transcendent human experience with the sure hand of a
Vermeer, fashioning events of verbal meaning with the impeccable ear of a
Yeats.
The first poem in The
Seconds, Bierds’ most recent collection, captures
the poet’s prosodic string theory in the figure of Philip V of
š
And indeed there will be time
Carlo
Broschi, the Italian castrato known to most as Farinelli, left
As the story goes, one afternoon in mid-August, from his
bed, Philip heard the castrato giving his first concert in the palace garden.
The unearthly singing conjured the king from his silence, and so he caged the
therapeutic bird, commanding nightly doses of arias until his death in 1746. Broschi,
stage-named Farinelli after his Neapolitan patron
Farina, was thereafter dubbed the Músico de Camara of Their Majesties and remunerated generously
with 1,500 guineas, a coach and eight mules--all tax-free.
Bierds opens The Seconds in a stupored
voice, projecting the volume’s first poem “Dementia Translucida”
from the ambiguous recesses of Philip’s memory, who reflects on his six-month
slump preceding Broschi’s arrival. For Philip’s
ministers, fluttering about the moonlit halls of the palace, an event is as
simple as an unruffled bedsheet: flat, finite,
defined by absolute points in space and time. By contrast, Philip’s is a
special knowledge of balled-up bedsheets—a private
relativity in an age of Newtonian mechanics.
My ministers slump through the
moonlit halls, wishing
me dead, or at least asleep. In their hands,
wide wings of parchment cackle.
Three times I have exited madness,
as a russet stag exits a pond—a
little shaking perhaps,
while the elements exchange their
sovereignty.
And now I am dragging a tepid
quill
through jaundiced patches of parchment,
affirming some birth or burning. I love the
season
luminescence.
Just space and a pulpy loam
defined by striations of night-blooming
cereus,
as wax is defined by a royal seal—
all the single-hued peaks and valleys
some wavering hand has passed over.
“Dementia
Translucida” employs a rhetorical tactic familiar to Bierds’ readers: a fusion of the poet’s consciousness with
that of her subject, such that, in this case, the speaker possesses an unlikely
verbal flair: recurring aviary allusion, strobing
luminescent diction, alliterative evocations of free-floating nebulae. Philip’s
diction hints at a metaphysical infection, outlining the cycloidal
path of his madness. The peaks and valleys of the furrowed cereus, tied
formally and etymologically to the
impressed wax of the royal seal, exchange their sovereignty, just as the poem’s
anapests and iambs exchange theirs.
As the king’s hand wavers, his
inked quill thrashing over the parchment, his inner eye drifts toward images of
stasis.
We sat with our
various pulses—the oval and boxed,
the jeweled and gilded, the weights,
escapements,
pallets and balances
all pulling their cyclic
citizenry. Near my elbow, a diminutive
swimmer
stroked the clepsydra’s pale bay,
pointing the hour
as the tides rose, his hand and
tunic
immaculate, the perpetual silk immersion
renders.
And all through the
room, on the tables
and walls, little doors introduced
their orioles,
and the pinions clicked, and the skaters
circled an icy mirror. My favorites
stood at the window: an indigo globe,
etched with the planets and stars, then
cinched by a band of passing days.
And just to the
left, a crystal box,
its pendulum bob a woman, prone
in her red cloak, slicing
the air like a full-bodied
figurehead.
Time tossed and
retrieved her shadow, again
and again, out over Polaris and a
distant Mars. . . .
Philip
compares himself, as well as the state and natural world, to a clock, a device,
rather than agent, that frames the passage of time.
Each jeweled entity emits a rhythmic music, the king his ticks and tocks, the
clocks their mechanical pulses, each stepping through its respective forecastle
door onto a terrace to address a “cyclic citizenry.” Neither the bedridden king
nor the caged oriole can abdicate its function as the beating heart of a body
politic.
Archetypal bards, the clocks yearn for a language
unsullied by partisanship. The water
clock’s diminutive swimmer symbolizes this sought-after liberty, an existence
unfettered by the weights, escapements, pallets and pinions of self-awareness.
Philip, like the clock-caged birds and circle-bound skaters, is tied to his
function. Notably, his favorite timepiece features a woman in a crystal cage, a
prone figurehead, tossed and retrieved, dominated by distant planets. The
cohabitation of the microscopic and astronomical in “Dementia Translucida” implies an unfulfilled desire to unify
seemingly incompatible metaphysical perspectives.
The regularity of time is the
fulcrum around which Philip’s pendulant existence swings. A room choked with
clocks counteracts the erosive effects of this Einsteinian
clock paradox conceived before its time. Parallax diminishes in close proximity
to the clocks; moments progress as if motion were absolute. This is the
“perpetual silk”—soothing, smothering—that “immersion renders.” Suddenly, the
voice of an emasculated bird dislodges Philip from his long meditation.
Six months. Then in through my window or wall
a voice began—not child, not man—a
castrato’s unwavering
luminescence. All the clock-works midway
to their pageantry, and there at the
doorframe or sill,
an aria from Hasse:
The sun is pale,
the heavens, troubled . . .
I tremble before my own heart.
Then something of
ice and liberty, then the notes
of a minuet. And over my chest and throat and skull
the elements shifted, began their
exchange.
The
lyric, excerpted from Hasse’s Artaserse, alludes to the stag
emerging from a pond: “a little shaking, perhaps, / while the elements exchange
their sovereignty.” Bierds
selects the same verb (“exit”) to describe Philip’s strophic swing from
depression to joy. The poet, the king, the animal, the sun, all rise from a
temporal immersion, trembling, voiceless newborns, warm and wet. The king greets the castrato’s “unwavering
luminescence,” cracking the door of his horological
cage with a wavering hand. Broschi’s aria (from the Latin aer) exchanges its sovereignty
with the water of the clepsydra (Greek for “water thief”) as the heavens grow
pale and a sense of free will returns to Philip, who once again dances to the
beat of his aortal drum. Gradually, the poem weaves its ticking seconds into a
fuller minuet—at once a musical piece
in two parts, the waltz of the sun and moon, the double-beat of a trembling
soul and, by way of an anagrammatic sleight-of-hand, a unit of 60 seconds.
Each night, as I
rise to my inverted day,
my castrato sings one aria’s notes,
year after year.
As
the oriole does.
I am soothed by their flawless
repetitions, and enter my day
content as the caravel’s deckhand—each of
us watching
his wide domain, there at our
forecastle’s door.
Each of us humming
some heavenly song,
as we lift and lower our wooden
arms….
š
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Prufrock languishes beside the window of his
Parisian flat. A sluggish fog nuzzles the terrace, and as it begins to settle
sleepily around the building, Prufrock succumbs to a
waking nightmare. During this lyrical astral projection, the metaphysical
foundation of his world dissolves: the Newtonian framework of time and space in
which the poem’s events ostensibly transpire gives way.
The Seconds revisits, in its
own way, Prufrock’s vision of temporal and spatial
distortion. Often its poems capture instances of sickness and death, in which
disparate events converge in singular expressions, as in “The Ponds,” which
depicts the psychological landscape of Kafka’s final hours: “So death, in the
body, forms a flaccid pond—or the body / in death—hourly deepening, stretching down
/ where lightless ligatures tangle and sway.” If the Prufrockian
ego laments the disintegration of metaphysical absolutes, the Bierdsian ego embraces it. In “From the Orchard,” spoken
through an incarnation of Marie Curie, for instance, the poet theorizes the
tangle-and-sway exchange of Apollinian disjunction
and Dionysian union.
Now and then in a shadowless
light cast equally on the rooftops and
hedgerows,
I think we are one
harmonious voice, one set
of days circling. Then something breaks
free—an oriole,
perhaps, sings out from the wall clock’s
tiny door—
and our singleness returns.
Reconfiguring
history into a cycle of shadowless days allows Bierds to timewarp to foreign
moments and locales, resurrect them from absence and
profile them for posterity. Where Prufrock projects a
point outside of space-time, asserting repeatedly that “there will be time,” Bierds
renders each moment immediately present, meditating on the problematic of
memory to bridge the gap between life and death. Unwinding these knotted
thematic strands in The Seconds,
however, demands consideration of the poet’s fifth volume, The Profile Makers, which profiles an artist with inclinations
similar to her own, the Civil War photographer Matthew Brady.
The Profile Makers addresses what Bierds’
Curie terms “our singleness” by blurring, through its various historical
incarnations, the distinction between artist and subject, inferring the absence
of a prime mover: that the authorship of Brady’s portraits, the majority of which
his army of assistants shot, and of the poems, which arise from the single
“harmonious voice” of Bierds’ collective personae, is
impossible to pin down. The volume’s profile-makers are at once poets,
photographers and assistants, as well as the entrenched cadavers of Brady’s
“Dead in the Hole.” Physical events, rather than abstract volition, render the
byproducts of living we call art; the mortar that pierces the flesh of the
soldier is no less a profile-maker than Brady or Bierds.
A chaos theory of the aesthetic will follows: a butterfly twitches its
wing in a distant weather system, setting in motion a series of events that
leads Bierds to conceive “Six in All,” a seven-part
poem consisting of six portraits and a prologue, divided between the volume’s
six sections and preface. The ineluctable wing notwithstanding, Bierds recounts a different stimulus: how she learned one
afternoon at the
The blossoms comprising The
Profile Makers exude a piquant aroma, collectively staging a meditation on
technologies of image-capturing, which reveal a human impulse to arrest moments
in time. Where painting, photography and writing variously profile events by
way of repetition, so the memory profiles the past by reproducing and morphing
it over generations of recollection. The preface of “Six in All” presents the
poem’s setting and key character, a cousin of one of Brady’s legion of faceless
aides, who has stumbled across his inanimate
blood-relatives haunting an interior greenhouse wall.
In later years, the
war long cold, he found
in surplus its brittle song: long
rooms
of glass plate negatives, with
lesser ones,
he told me—snow-white carbines
stacked in rows,
a soldier shoveling ghostly coal—
revived as greenhouse windows. The houses
are magnificent, glass rows of smoky
apparitions
that disappear, he said, when rains
begin, that melt, for human eyes at
least, into
a kind of nothingness. Then only metal frames
are seen, like netting on the land.
The
greenhouse offers a trove of ever-blooming traces. Demented events continue to
revise themselves in this translucent memory-making machine: as the rains come,
the housed images melt “for human eyes at least, into / a kind of nothingness,”
putting his memory in lock-down, shutting out the light and muting its brittle
song. The negatives, like Philip’s birds, are cyclic citizenry of the seasons.
Following its preface, “Six in All” moves into the
first-person, and Bierds' point of view melds with
that of her “second,” the cousin, who quickly alludes to an existential angst
with which the poet’s fans are quite familiar.
Two years beyond
this negative, my father drowned
off
They say on death
the lungs accept the sea, inhale
its foreign element, the way I think
the shutter’s mouth
draws time inside to timelessness.
While
the speaker’s father is twice slain, the comparison of the shutter to a mouth
infers periodic deaths: the shutter closes, the father drowns and once again the
clock door slams on the beak of the oriole. The elements exchange their
sovereignty in the pond of the lungs.
Death arrives as a series of drownings: the camera, the water, the breath of the speaker—all overpower
the father’s song.
The problem of autobiographical
representation is hardly original, addressed most famously perhaps in William
Wordsworth’s The Prelude. One senses Bierds
would have acknowledged this co-author, but decided instead to pay homage to
his sister Dorothy, an apt choice, given her harmonious bond with both William
and Samuel Coleridge, a friendship the latter once characterized as “three
persons and one soul.” In “Shawl, Dorothy Wordsworth at 80,” Bierds pictures the poet’s sister in the year of her death
contemplating the alarmingly organic nature of memory.
Once, I was told of
a sharp-shinned hawk
who pursued the reflection of its
fleeing prey
through three striations of greenhouse
glass:
the arrow of its body cracking first
into anteroom,
then desert, then the thick mist
of the fuchsias. It lay in a bloodshawl
of ruby flowers, while the petals of
glass
on the brick-work floor repeated its
image.
Again
and again and again.
As all we have
passed through sustains us.
Dorothy’s
story warns of the danger posed by simulacra, the principal peril of
profile-making. By reciting the hawk’s unwitting suicide, Dorothy brings the
volume, if not Bierds’ entire oeuvre, into focus, dramatizing how a past can accumulate in the
present. Bierds reconfigures this loss, this passage
through greenhouse glass into a lethal future, as necessary protection from the
elements, a mortal coil that, like a shawl, “sustains us.”
Recollecting her brother’s death,
Dorothy dresses him warmly in a “fever-coat,” another reflection of the hawk’s
“bloodshawl.” Death is marked by a compulsion for
refrain: glass petals repeat ruby fuchsias, repeat the bird’s death, repeat Dorothy’s imminent passing and so on, until
repetition mimics itself in the poem’s penultimate line, executing a death
march of anapests. Recalling Curie’s thoughts before their time, evoking the
birdsong of Philip’s madness, yet to be imagined and perhaps already imagined,
Dorothy muses, “I reenter the world through a shallow door / and linger within
it, conversation returning, / the lateral cycle of days.”
š
As if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns
on a screen
As
profiled events replicate endlessly, causal origin, conceived of as a
two-dimensional point in space-time, disappears. Bierds
profiles a pantheon of ur-profilers, each an
analogous assistant in a campaign to capture the face of death: Etienne de
Silhouette, Rembrandt van Rijn, Antony
Van Leewenhoek, John Lavater,
Louis Daguerre, Julia Margaret Cameron, Thomas Edison, Samuel Morse, the cave
painters of
If I were real, I would offer a
flower. But I
have taken a body of water, stirred
through with cyanide salts. Slick and
transparent,
they stroke their signature to the
echoing self.
Which is
nothing. And from which
nothing rises at all.
A
flurry of details clouds the death of Henry Adam’s wife, known among her
friends as Clover. Found in her bedroom lying beside an open vial of potassium
cyanide salts, used to process photographs, Clover was deemed a suicide, and
the poem’s title foregrounds that interpretation. But conviction about the
authorial identity of Clover’s demise remains elusive. Henry destroyed all of
his wife’s letters and photographs and neglected her in The Education of Henry Adams. Such efforts to erase her memory—to
muzzle her “echoing self”—have naturally raised suspicions. Many believe a
ghost writer may have been afoot. Add to the picture Henry’s romantic missives
to Lizzie Cameron, and conspiracy theories abound.
The memorial Henry commissioned
for Clover’s grave at the
Cyanide suffocates the heart,
binding with hemoglobin and obstructing the passage of oxygen through the
bloodstream. Cells wither. The heart ceases to beat.
On that downslope just over his heart, just
to the right of his left nipple,
on a cream-reach of skin—sometimes
warm, cool,
peppered there, then there
with specks the crimson of
strawberries—
is a thumb-sized nitroglycerin
patch.
It sends to his
heart the impulse to open,
to live, to not curl on itself like
a leaf on fire.
“Patch,”
from Bierds’ The
Ghost Trio, depicts a man bearing a pulmonary crutch: something to stir the
heart, a seed of ego. The patch of the angina patient symbolizes the human
soul, gives rise to its bodily incarnation, resembling a second patch, one that
compels the rhythmic progression of memory: in the midst of a forest fire, the
man’s granduncle burns through and pats out a patch of scrubgrass,
forging an island of ash in a lake of fire.
How he burned
through a fraction of scrubgrass, then
patted it out, stretched his long body
on the blank ashes, drew in his pant
legs,
drew in his wide soul, clung
to the blue-black rim of the soil
while the fire jumped over him, slid
with its rattling burn line to the
left,
right of him. And although it was just
the size
of a shed top, quick breach in a
world of burning,
nonetheless the patch held him, the whole of
him,
sustained the lifelong expanse of
him—balanced
there on the pin-tip of earth, still
rippled with the ghost shapes of grasses.
Specks
of crimson hint at an analogous burning in the topographical breast of the
heart-patient. At once transcendental and earthy— soul and soil —each
patch cradles a life, a “quick breach in a world of burning.” The imminence of
death, the body’s reunion with a combusting world, is latent in the patch, in
the volatility of a compound and the constant proximity of fire.
If the heart represents the body,
then the patch represents the soul, the I trembling before the heart in the lines from Artaserse. The
patch mends a rupture, anchors the individual in a world marked by aesthetic,
ethical and epistemological fragmentation. To the poet, it offers a vibrant
image. To the scientist, an absolute origin from which to
begin a story of knowledge. The postmodern subject, Jean Baudrillard writes in The
Ecstasy of Communication, “can no longer produce the limits of his own
being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no
longer produce himself as mirror. He is now only pure screen, a switching
center for all the networks of influence.” Unlike Prufrock,
who laments his fragmentation, the magical projection of his nerves onto a
screen, as if he were himself a glass plate negative, Bierds’
personae collectively strive to mend modern fragmentation, not to herald a
return to a premodern state of absolute
certainty—hardly that!—but to affirm the essentially human character of this
striving.
Working from a Cartesian
soul-body trope, with the clapper a ghost in the machine of the bell, Bierds’ Heart and
Perimeter resonates such themes. The term
“perimeter” infers that “meter” begins at the margins of the body, but emanates
from a much deeper place. Exploiting the figure of the bell, Bierds attempts to repair the emotional enervation that
characterizes modern life. “Halley’s
In a diving bell
drawn from the blueprints of Halley,
my son would visit each breach, sit
on the dome bench
at the absolute standoff of worlds:
water and air in equal
resistance. At the glass-slick lip of the
bell, he told me,
is a shield made perfect by the
elements,
by the irrefutable theorem of
pressing back. There is wind now, just over
the hedgerows, and the ratchet of the
milk cart.
Drawing
on the diving bell design of Edmund Halley, Sir Marc Isambard
Brunel devised a tunnel-shield to protect subaqueous miners from cave-ins during the construction of
the Thames Tunnel in 1825. Brunel’s son, the poem’s
speaker, inherits not only his father’s name, but his breach-afflicted tunnel
project. Between the old generation and new, then, the bell persists. Enclosed
in the perimeter of his father’s shadow, the son functions as a clapper,
echoing a music begun before his birth. The mortal
bell, fragile and transparent, is “glass slick,” and its resistance is an
“irrefutable theorem of / pressing back,” fashioned from a
symmetry of opposites: heart and perimeter, bell and clapper, father and
son, dancer and dance.
š
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse
The Polonian
tradition with which Prufrock identifies himself, comprised of educated tongues blind to what any
uneducated person can see, recalls the foolish sophists of Mennipean
satire. Take the latinizing Master Janotus de Bragmardo who, in the
nineteenth chapter of the first book of The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, lectures Gargantua
in an attempt to repossess the stolen bells of Notre Dame: Consider, Domine; I have been eighteen days matagrabolizing
this fine harangue. Over-stuffed scholars, litigators and attendant lords
who veil themselves in ten-cent words and nickel-deeds fail to command central
roles in their respective tragedies. For critics of poetry, the question thus
stands: how do we distinguish poets grappling with tragic conflicts from those
simply full of high sentence, a bit obtuse, able to swell only a progress or
two? Among modern poets, might we consider F. T. Marinetti
the Polonius to Ezra Pound’s prince of
Compared with her Anglophone
peers, Bierds seems particularly vulnerable to the
accusation that she shrouds her poems in unnecessary erudition and high
sentence, jealously reserving details with which her readers could otherwise
absorb meaning on a first read. When Bierds’ readers take her poetry to task, it is usually for
the Eliotic scholarship, sans footnotes, that
foregrounds her verbal and thematic fireworks. Even those who find her work
powerful and engaging appear to bite their tongues. David Walker, for instance,
in his glowing review of The Stillness,
the Dancing, admits at one point that “some of Bierds’
poems are dense and extremely difficult—after repeated readings, I’m still not
sure I understand the several levels of ‘A Collector’s Letter on the Last’ or
‘Abelard the Drowned.’” Coming across “
In reviewing Heart and Perimeter, David Baker enthuses that a “reader might
actually learn something” as he
explores Bierds’ curio cabinet of “oddities, arcana, and assiduous learning.” Those less fond of being
left in the dark may find Bierds’ poetry
frustratingly aloof. In a recent interview, Bierds
confronted this issue when her interviewer asked whether a reader’s ignorance
of withheld details about the depicted photographer, painter or musical piece
made her work gratuitously unreadable. Conceding that she often struggles to
imbed key information without overburdening her poems, resisting an impulse to
footnote, she denied the suggestion that she uses an “exclusionary dynamic,” or
that she needs to bring her poetry “down a few notches,” as one reader
suggested. This accusation, Bierds rightly observed,
rests on the assumption that poetry has a defined responsibility and should
conform to particular rules of accessibility. Her own stance on the matter is
relatively catholic: she herself finds certain verse, including the work of
some Language and Hip-Hop poets, indecipherable. “So be it,” she concludes,
“Art thrives on diversity, not conformity.”
Bierds
approaches each poem, as Fellini approached film,
with an infinite capacity for wonder. The principal strengths of her poetry are
its otherworldly detail and consistently sensuous music, subtly controlled,
despite Baker’s claim that she neither rhymes nor counts beats. Take the
inspiringly arcane sophistication of “The Grandsire Bells,” written as an oral
manifestation of change-ringing music, where five bells are rung first in a
given order, conventionally annotated 1-2-3-4-5, and rearranged subsequently
according to the so-called grandsire pattern.
The
second line in the grandsire sequence evolves from the first by way of a
transposition of notes in the right and left bell pairs (1-2 and 4-5). In
subsequent lines, the reordering of notes continues in a pendulous right-left
pattern until the piece returns to its initial arrangement when the player
applies the initial transposition rule to the 2-1-3-5-4 order. Bierds transplants the grandsire pattern into an
eleven-stanza poem, treating each end word as a distinct bell note, allowing
slight variations through half-rhyme. “The Grandsire Bells” omits only the last
of the looping orders, repeating the initial end-word arrangement in the final
stanza to achieve a sestina-like music.
At first quick
glance and lingering second,
the five, sludge-smeared miners on
the roadway—
through this premorning
light, with their shock
of canary in its braided cage—
might have seemed to the five ringers
approaching
like a portrait of memory, like the
sway
and blear of themselves in memory:
the bend
of bootsoles
in the myrtle grass, black
caps, yellow lantern flame, the
knapsack stings
of rhubarb and mildew. And the village
below, coal fires granting to the fresh
day
plumes in the fashion of cypresses—base
knot,
stalk, the splintering crown-tip—a kind
of memory also, as the ringers
trudged
up the hillside, past the miners and
smoke strings…
The
five bell groupings of the poem’s first three stanzas are second, bend and kind; roadway, sway and day; shock,
black and knot; cage, village and trudged; and approaching,
stings and strings. The lines are roughly pentametrical,
suggesting a formal sensibility. Tracing the “hunt paths” of the bells and
words as they wind through the vertically-arranged orders, a double-helix
materializes. Some free verse poets dabble in traditional form, but few
genetically encode their verse the way Bierds has in
“The Grandsire Bells.”
Given her
intricate vocalic designs, one wonders why Bierds
does not, as Baker puts it, “do more to vary her poems’ prosodic routines. So many unusual things happen to so many
people in her work, and yet the poems are formally similar, often close to the
same length—approximately fifty lines—and with no especially compelling organic
reasons for their comparable shapes or sizes.” This reserved criticism is fair,
as presumably such a consummate scholar and verbal technician could do much
more, experimenting with different formal designs, line lengths and narrative
strategies. At times, though the vibrant images and vertiginous conceits may
astound, Bierds’ prosodic routines can be cloyingly
familiar. On occasions when Bierds does try to
venture outside of her musical mainstays, the end-result can seem false. The
single concrete poem in the poet’s oeuvre, “The Diagnostic Silhouettes of John Lavater: 1795,” falls flat on its profiled face. While a
silhouette-poem makes a logical addition to The
Profile Makers thematically, its execution proves a mere shadow of the
fleshy selves of her other incarnations.
š
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas
Surely
we can excuse Bierds the metronomicity
of her lyric, especially if we regard the poems as collectively scavenging a Stevensian dump for discarded images, sounds and
sensibilities with which to reconstruct a sense of self. Ask Bierds, and she
will tell you of her “Bildungsroman-as-anthology,”
a scrapbook of favorite poems 30 years in the making, a shoal of words and
imagery across which she has scuttled for decades, Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee
From Me” under one rock, Samuel Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” under another.
Her tidepool openly embraces historical and formal
difference, assimilating individual poetic achievement into the collective
voice that sings to her inner ear. If Bierds’ music
drones, it is the irresistible drone of nature and human habit.
Collectively, the poems comprise an elegy to a missing
sense, a lost knowledge of temporal and spatial absolutes, as compulsory as an
amputee’s urge to itch a phantom limb. This ghostly ache has haunted Bierds since
her earliest poems, articulated most clearly in “Tongue,” from Flights of the Harvest-Mare.
Imagine another,
blind, deaf since birth.
One, nearly two, she
squats at the lip
of a shallow pond. Above her,
the day exchanges its sunlight,
clouds.
This she feels in
blushes across her shoulders.
With a sleepwalker’s
grope
she is reaching, patting the cold
grasses,
and now, from a tangle of water
cardinals
she has plucked a pond-snail. Moist
and shell-less
it sucks across her palm.
Tongue, she senses, the simile
wordless, her fingers tracing the plump
muscle,
the curling tip.
Someone approaches.
To the bowl
of her free hand, the name is
spelled
the tingling sn and ail.
Again. Again.
And soon she will
learn. The naming.
The borders of self,
other. But for now, propped in the
musky
shoregrass, it is tongue she senses,
as if the snail, mute, in the lick
of its earthy foot,
contained a story. As if her hand
received it.
In
the beginning, language flowed forth into the palm of a blind and deaf
child—who acquired through communion with nature a sixth sense: the borders of
self and other, the prelapsarian ability to name. For
the poet, insightful by virtue of her blindness, language comes
incrementally. Sounds
congregate into syllables. The force of simile, the elemental opposite
of naming, precedes the human tendency to construct narrative: the snail offers
something like a story, though not a story. The poet, modeled after an
infant Helen Keller, merely simulates the story’s reception.
The notion of poet as elegist to
a missing sense is even more striking if one considers that Bierds
has lived with degenerative myopia since her own infancy, knowing all the while
that her vision is slowly dimming. This
knowledge, she claims, at least partially explains her persistent fascination
with the image, why she returns time and again to the visual arts and film in
her poetry. Where Keller was born into
her sightless, soundless existence, however, Bierds
has come to terms with her condition gradually, learning as a poet to live
without a sense she has not yet lost. One can trace a lineage of ruminations on
blind and deaf figures in her work, culminating most recently in “The Bats,”
based on Ludwig von Beethoven, who in the dusk of life lost his hearing—though
not his ears.
My ears are thick
with the matings of drone bees,
their eternal, unvarying thrum.
And with the
blossoms of swab-cloth that
gradually fill with a yellowing sap. Each dusk
the entire array—earlobes and drones,
the blood-rich canals—is rinsed
with the oil of almonds and a lukewarm
there is nothing. Or
a gradual lessening.
Although I have
developed a sense
for vibration. This evening I watched
through an open transom
as a gaggle of waiters circled their
fingers
on the crystal rims of glasses.
From their postures
I knew
they were laughing—washed in white,
with an oblong of Viennese green at
their throats.
Bierds
moves gently from hive to ear, the yellowing sap of Beethoven’s dying aural
canal melding sounds into a meaningless whir. Language transforms into a hive
of blood-rich canals, constructed, repaired and honeyed by drones. Though the
composer’s ears are rinsed daily with diluted almond oil, “there is nothing,”
an absence grimly dramatized by enjambment across stanzas. Still, Beethoven
develops a replacement sense of vibration, as well as a replacement language of
gesture. The hive inevitably adapts.
“You feel the world’s word as a tension: a hum, a single
chorused note everywhere the same,” writes Annie Dillard in “Teaching a Stone
to Talk.” “The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is
God’s brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten
thousand things, the whine of wings.”
Perhaps every poet hears this, the eternal, unvarying thrum of bee
wings, the screech of bats “who send through the air a method of seeing.”
Having attempted this forensic conversion of clues, I am
left submerged in the silence of the poet. Over the din of this ocean, I do not
think she will sing to me.
We live as we
can. In the eye
of their winnowing paths I am everything.
A
man drawn whole by sound.