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NER Classics | Linda Bierds

April

October 9, 2015

April by Linda Bierds
was originally published in NER 13.2 (1990).

Frosty_thistles_(3105757058)

A little wind. One creak from a field crow.
And the plow rips a shallow furrow, hobbles
from guide-stake to guide-stake,
draws its first contour line,
and parallel, its next, next,
then the turn-strips and deadfurrows,the headlands
and buffer lines, until the earth from a crow’s vantage
takes the pattern of a fingertip.

And by noon the shadows are gridways: cut soil,
the man on the plow, the plow and simple tail,
each squat on the stretch of slender shade,
black and grid-straight, like the line of anti-light

a screen clicks up to, before its image
swells, deepens. Dark glass
going green, in the shade-darkened room
of a laboratory- it casts a little blush
across the face there, the shoulders and white pocket,
then magnifies the moon-skin of a microbe, then deeper,
electron molecules in a beam so stark it smolders.

The man on the plow fears frost,
its black cancer.The man at the screen
fears the storm an atom renders
on the lattice of a crystal. And heat. And the slick
back-licks of vapor. With luck, with the patience
the invisible nurtures, he will reshape

frost-making microbes, snip frost-hook genes
with a knife of enzymes. And at thirty degrees,
twenty, through seam lines of snap beans, oranges,
almonds, potatoes, no frost will form, no ratchet-bite
of ice, all the buds of transformed microbes
blossoming, reblossoming, like the first flowers.

[read more]

Filed Under: NER Classics Tagged With: April, Linda Bierds, NER Classics

Volume 40, Number 3
Cover art by Anna Dibble

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Beach Reading

Leath Tonino

Beach Reading

Mind, text, wilderness—I’ve long been fascinated by their interactions. Specifically, I’ve been fascinated by what happens when we lug books into nature, when we situate our reading within a context of more-than-human energies, when we rest the butt on a barnacled rock or driftwood bench and fill the brain to brimming: sentences, crying birds, definitions, slanting light.

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