Prologue

They darken. In the sky over Florence,

the oblong clouds swell and darken.

And hailstones lift back through the updrafts,

thickening, darkening, until, swollen as bird eggs,

they drop to the cobbled streets.

Horses! the child Galileo thinks, then

peeks through the doorway

to the shock of ten thousand icy hooves.

At his back, his father is tuning violins,

and because there is nothing sharper at hand

Galileo saws through a captured hailstone

with a length of E-string,

the white globe opening slowly, and the pattern inside

already bleeding its frail borders.

Layers and layers of ice—

Like what? Onion pulp? Cypress rings?

If only the room were colder, and the eye

finer. If only the hand were faster,

and the blade sharper, and firmer,

and without a hint of song . . .

Copyright Credit: Linda Bierds, "Prologue" 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)