The Highland
By Linda Bierds
—Zelda Fitzgerald, 1939
Dear One,
Do you have the time? Can you take
the time? Can you make
the time?
To visit me? The hospital doors have opened to spring,
and its land is high, dear one, each slope
with a vapor of crocuses. Its citizens, alas,
are low. Despondent, in fact, though a jar of sun tea
tans on the sill. The woman beside me
has opened the gift of a china doll, an antique
Frozen Charlotte. Glass face, a cap of china hair,
shellacked to the sheen of a chestnut.
At breakfast the shifting returned, dreadful
within me: colors were infinite, part of the air . . .
lines were free of the masses they held. The melon,
a cloud; and the melon, an empty,
oval lariat.
They have moved the canvas chair
from the window. Sun, enhanced
by the brewing jar, threw
an apricot scorch on the fabric. The fruit,
a cloud. The fruit,
a doll-sized, empty lariat.
D. O., into what shape
will our shaplessness flow?
Dear One,
Italian escapes me. Still, I float to the operas
of Hasse and Handel, a word now and then
lifting through . . . sole, libertà. In an earlier time,
the thrum-plumped voice of a countertenor—half male,
half female—might place him
among us, we who are thickened
by fracturings. D. O., now and then, my words
break free of the masses they hold.
Think of wind, how it barks through the reeds
of a dog's throat. How the pungent, meaty stream of it
cracks into something like words—but not. I just sit
in the sun room then, slumped in my fur and slabber,
feeling the wolf begin, back away, then some
great-jawed, prehistoric other
begin, back away, then the gill-less,
the gilled, then the first pulsed flecks
begin, back away, until only a wind remains,
vast and seamless. No earth, no heavens.
No rise, no dip. No single flash of syllable
that might be me. Or you.
D. O.,
Now a gauze of snow on the crocuses! I woke
to its first brilliance—midnight, great moon—
and walked through the hallways. The pin-shaped leaves
of the potted cosmos threw a netted shadow,
and I stopped in its fragile harmony,
my arms, bare feet, the folds of my limp gown
striped by such weightless symmetry
I might have been
myself again. Through an open screen door
I saw a patient, drawn out by the brightness perhaps,
her naked body a ghastly white, her face
a ghastly, frozen white, fixed
in a bow-mouthed syncope, like something
out of time. As we are, D. O., here
in the Highland, time's infinite, cyclic now-and-then
one simple flake of consciousness
against the heated tongue.
Dear One,
My Italian improves:
sole, libertà,
and Dio, of course, D. O.! (Although He
has forsaken me.) The tea at the window
gleams like the flank of a chestnut horse. It darkens
imperceptibly, as madness does, or dusk.
All morning, I held a length of cotton twine—
a shaggy, oakum filament—
between the jar and brewing sun.
We made a budding universe: the solar disc,
the glassy globe of reddish sea, the stillness
in the firmament. At last across the cotton twine
a smoke began, a little ashless burn, Dio,
that flared and died so suddenly
its light has yet to reach me.
Copyright Credit: Linda Bierds, "The Highland" 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)