For the Sake of Retrieval

As Whistler heard colors like a stretch of music—

long harmonies, violet to amber, double hummings of

silver, opal—so, in reverse, these three in their capsule,

free falling two hours through the black Atlantic, ears

popped, then filled with the music of Bach or Haydn,

might fashion a landscape. Low notes bring

a prairie perhaps, the sharps a smatter of flowers,

as the pip notes of sonar spring back to the screen

in little blossoms. They have come for the lost Titanic

and find instead, in the splayed beam of a headlamp,

silt fields, pale and singular, like the snow fields

of Newfoundland. On its one runner blade the capsule slides,

slips out through drift hummocks, through

stones the Ice Age glaciers dropped, its trail

the foot-thin trail of a dancer, who

plants, glides, at his head the flurry

of a ship's chandelier, at his back a cinch-hook of icebergs

cast down through the winds of Newfoundland.

The music these three absorb

stops with the wreckage, with words

lipped up through a microphone:

flange, windlass, capstan, hull plating, then oddly, syllables

at a slant, as light might slant through window slats,

stairsteps, doorknob, serving bowl, teacup, Bordeaux.

Mechanical fingers, controlled by the strokes

of a joy stick, brush over debris, lifting, replacing.

In jittery strobe lights, camera lights, all colors

ground down to a quiet palette,

angles return, corners and spirals

pull back to the human eye—as if from some

iced and black-washed atmosphere, boiler coal,

a footboard and platter, each common shape

brightened, briefly held for the sake of retrieval.

The current spins silt like a sudden storm.

With the intricacy of a body the capsule adjusts,

temperature, pressure. Someone coughs, then the three

sit waiting, as in Whistler's Sad Sea

three are waiting. All around them are dollops

of winter wind, everywhere beach and sea. No horizon

at all in this painting, just a grey/brown thrum

beach to sea. How steady his breath must have been

on the canvas, his hands on the brushstrokes

of lap robes, of bonnets and beach chairs, the pull

of a red umbrella: each simple shape

loved and awash in the landscape.

Copyright Credit: Linda Bierds, "For the Sake of Retrieval" 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)