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Flight

By Linda Bierds b. 1945 Linda Bierds

Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic—

back from bone the echoes stroke, back

from the halved heart, the lungs

three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills.

From a leather chaise, the astronaut's withered legs

dangle, as back they come, sounds

a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape.

The physician cocks his head and taps—exactly

as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock

chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved

and halved, until a roof appears, black as space.

I'm gaining ground, he says, the astronaut,

who knows, from space, earth is just a blue-green glow,

a pilot light he circled once, lifted, swiftly flown

above the rafters and atmospheres, half himself

and half again some metamorphic click,

extinct as memory. I'm gaining ground,

he says, and back it comes, his glint

of cloud-crossed world: a pilot light

or swaddled leaf, green in the season's infancy.

Source: Poetry (September 2006).

Biography

Linda Bierds was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska and earned her BA and MA, with an emphasis in fiction, from the University of Washington. Bierds credits her poetry’s distinct style and interests to her early work as a fiction writer. She spoke to Contemporary Authors about life after receiving her degree: “Once on my own, writing each morning before going to a part-time job as a file clerk, it was poetry that attracted me. . . .

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