The Ghost Trio

By Linda Bierds

1. The Winter: 1748

—Erasmus Darwin, 1731-1802

A little satin like wind at the door.

My mother slips past in great side hoops,

arced like the ears of elephants—

on her head a goat-white wig,

on her cheek a dollop of mole.

She has entered the evening, and I

her room with its hazel light.

Where her wig had rested is a leather head,

a stand, perfect in its shadow but

carrying in fact, where the face should be,

a swath of door. It cups

in its skull-curved closure

clay hair stays, a pouch of wig talc

that snows at random and lends to the table

a neck-shaped ring.

When I reach inside I am frosted,

my hand like a pond in winter, pale

fingers below of leaves or carp.

I have studied a painting from Holland,

where a village adjourns to a frozen river.

Skaters and sleighs, of course, but

ale tents, the musk of chestnuts,

someone thick on a chair with a lap robe.

I do not know what becomes of them

when the flow revisits. Or why

they have moved from their warm hearthstones

to settle there—except that one step

is a method of gliding,

the self for those moments

weightless and preened as my leather companion.

And I do not know if the fish there

have frozen, or wait in some stasis

like flowers. Perhaps they are stunned

by the strange heaven—dotted with

boot soles and chair legs—

and are slumped on the mud-rich bottom,

waiting through time for a kind of shimmer,

an image perhaps, something

known and familiar, something

rushing above in their own likeness,

silver and blade-thin at the rim of the world.

2. The Lions: North Staffordshire, 1770

—James Whitfield, 1735-1772

There are backflows of broom and mayweed,

coal rillets

slick on the mine path.

And the bulrush reeds stretch up from the marsh pond

like the stiffened tails of lions.

I walk toward a village of perfect exchange:

my life taking coal from the earth, then the potter

in turn taking heat from the coal, the earth

giving up an arc shape of pot, and the pot

giving back, in some fired brilliance,

a raspberry vine. . . .

We make from the spines of bulrush reeds

our tallow candles, each turn

in a trough of sheep fat

increasing their marble. They burn with a kind

of spitting and cast to the walls

an equal division of soot and light,

all the surfaces gradually blackening,

around the crucifix, the pastel sketch of

a peach and char.

Through the windows,

great kilns cast the shadows of scent jars.

It is a kind of immortality for us, that

entering, that coming away, icicles thick

in the drift tunnels, our lungs half functioning,

but functioning—each chest with its hissing

like a room with a brook running under it.

When the earth shudders just over our heads,

we say that the lions are walking,

down from the marsh pond, out through

the seams. We die with their chests

pressed over our chests. In feast position.

In rubble or in bed.

The lions are with us, we say to our children,

although nothing is there but

the bedclothes. They have come for their tails,

that sputter and flare on the bedposts

and mark with their compass-point brilliance

the absolute boundaries of

any world opening under us.

3. Wedgwood: 1790

—Josiah Wedgwood, 1730-1795

When smallpox settles like sand at the knee

each upstep is a rasp, each kneeling

the hiss, then downwash of seedpods.

Just a boy, I limped past a pity

of cantering geese, black-beaked with madness,

each with its burden of drunken rider,

then crossed the short tracks of moorland waste,

the gorse tufts, the low-slung canopies of broom.

Near the treeline, a single deer stepped

into a stillness, watched me from a stillness,

a magical closure of particles, light. Behind me,

the pot banks of Burslem shivered like hives.

I grew, declined. My cane tip

a hail on the cobbles. And each day,

each year, from a salt glaze or green glaze:

knife-hafts, pickle-leaves, then creamers, Queen's ware,

the press of the moulder's board, the dip

of the baller's scale. I visited the chemists.

I visited the soil.

One spring, they severed my leg with a surgeon's blade.

And up through the rice grains of laudanum,

through the stupor, dream, as the blade

wheezed with the breath-strokes of sleepers,

I watched the still globe of our earth

shatter and rush, burst away in an instant—

particles, light. Then a cough. The thin

lispings of thread under skin.

On a wooden limb—brindled and cold as a pike—

I walked and re-walked the kiln-room floors,

saw on the rackworks those jasper bodies, cawk-white

and luminous. And where was I going those years

of my life, pigments of gorse and heath

flaring, fading on the hillsides?

In the royal chambers one morning, I watched

as the Queen, from an elbow pad of claret velvet,

reached up with her forearm and open hand

to the open hand of the glove maker. From her

nails and knuckles to her palm, wrist,

he stroked out a cover of suckling fawn, translucent,

fragile as the inner skin of eggs.

Then a flush rose in the rims of her ears,

as if she imagined an alternate world, as if

through that dappled membrane, she were held

by an alternate world—suspended—like water

by a vase still rich with the coal-scent of fire.

And as long as she did not move at all,

there she would stay.

Source: The Ghost Trio: Poems (Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1994)