Wonders

In a wide hoop of lamplight, two children—

a girl and her younger brother—jump marbles

on a star-shaped playboard. Beside them,

in a chair near a window, their father

thinks of his mother, her recent death

and the grief he is trying to gather.

It is late October. The hooplight spreads

from the family, through the window,

to the edge of a small orchard, where

a sudden frost has stripped the fruit leaves

and only apples hang, heavy and still

on the branches.

The man looks from the window, down

to a scrapbook of facts he is reading.

The spider is proven to have memory, he says,

and his son, once again, cocks his small face

to the side, speaks a guttural oh, as if

this is some riddle he is slowly approaching,

as if this long hour, troubled with phrases

and the queer turn in his father's voice,

is offered as a riddle.

There is the sound of marbles

in their suck-hole journeys, and the skittery

jump of the girl's shoe

as she waits, embarrassed, for her father

to stop, to return to his known self, thick

and consistent as a family bread.

But still he continues,

plucking scraps from his old book, old

diary of wonders: the vanishing borders

of mourning paper, the ghostly shape

in the candled egg, beak and eye

etched clearly, a pin-scratch of claw.

A little sleet scrapes at the window.

The man blinks, sees his hand on the page

as a boy's hand, sees his children bent over

the playboard, with the careful pattern

of their lives dropping softly away, like

leaves in a sudden frost—how the marbles

have stalled, heavy and still on their fingers,

and after each phrase the guttural

oh, and the left shoe jumping.

Copyright Credit: Linda Bierds, "Wonders" from Flight. Copyright © 2008 by Linda Bierds. Used by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Source: Flight (Putnam, 2008)