Roget's Illusion Read online

  ALSO BY LINDA BIERDS

  Flight: New and Selected Poems (2008)

  First Hand (2005)

  The Seconds (2001)

  The Profile Makers (1997)

  The Ghost Trio (1994)

  Heart and Perimeter (1991)

  The Stillness, the Dancing (1988)

  Flights of the Harvest-Mare (1985)

  A MARIAN WOOD BOOK

  Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  Copyright © 2014 by Linda Bierds

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bierds, Linda.

  [Poems. Selections]

  Roget’s Illusion / Linda Bierds.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  “A Marian Wood Book.”

  ISBN 978-1-101-62403-6

  I. Title.

  PS3552.I357A6 2014

  811’.54—dc23 201303715

  Version_1

  Once again, for Sydney

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines where these poems first appeared, some in a slightly earlier form:

  American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, “Navigation”; The Atlantic Monthly, “On Reflection,” “Simulacra,” “Sketchbook”; Bellingham Review, “Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice”; Blackbird, “Meriwether and the Magpie”; Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, “Girl in a Dove-Gray Dress,” “Pavo”; Field, “Salvage”; Fifth Wednesday Journal, “Darwin’s Mirror”; Gulf Coast, “Notes from Prehistory”; The Journal, “Pierrots, Slightly Leaning: Brighton, 1915, Venice, 1903,” “Steller’s Jay,” “Thoughts Toward the First Christmas Lecture”; The Laurel Review, “Dürer near Fifty”; New England Review, “The Swifts”; Northwest Review, “From the Sea of Tranquillity”; Poem-A-Day (Academy of American Poets), “Incomplete Lioness”; Poetry, “Accountancy: Dürer in Antwerp,” “Flight”; Poetry Northwest, “Correlation of the Physical Forces,” “Fragments from Venice: Albrecht Dürer,” “From Campalto”; The Seattle Review, “Enthusiasm”; TSR: The Southampton Review, “The Moths”; Water~Stone Review, “The Shepherd’s Horn.”

  “Accountancy: Dürer in Antwerp” and “The Swifts” were reprinted in Poetry Daily; “1918 Huber Light Four” was issued in a limited-edition broadside published by Brooding Heron Press, Waldron Island, Washington.

  Thanks also to The Alhambra Poetry Calendar for reprinting a number of these poems: “Accountancy: Dürer in Antwerp” (2008), “Navigation” (2009), “Notes from Prehistory” (2010), “The Moths” (2011), “Pavo” (2012), “Darwin’s Mirror” (2013).

  CONTENTS

  Also by Linda Bierds

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Part One

  Roget’s Illusion: One

  Simulacra

  Notes from Prehistory

  Dürer near Fifty

  Sketchbook

  Fragments from Venice: Albrecht Dürer

  From the Sea of Tranquillity

  Pavo

  Flight

  1918 Huber Light Four

  Part Two

  Roget’s Illusion: Two

  The Evening Star

  Thoughts Toward the First Christmas Lecture

  Navigation

  Correlation of the Physical Forces

  Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice

  Accountancy: Dürer in Antwerp

  Biography

  From Campalto

  Girl in a Dove-Gray Dress

  Meriwether and the Magpie

  Incomplete Lioness

  On Reflection

  Part Three

  Roget’s Illusion: Three

  Steller’s Jay

  Details Depicted: Insect and Hair

  Enthusiasm

  Darwin’s Mirror

  The Moths

  Salvage

  The Swifts

  Pierrots, Slightly Leaning: Brighton, 1915, Venice, 1903

  The Shepherd’s Horn

  PART ONE

  Roget’s Illusion: One

  • PETER MARK ROGET, 1779–1869

  Best known for gradations of language

  and not for the carriage wheel spinning beyond

  a picket fence, its curious optical deception.

  Best known for the word-on-word columns I follow,

  semblance to severance, biography to bracken,

  his synonyms, antonyms, metonyms, idioms,

  and not for his paper on

  wheel spokes glimpsed through vertical apertures.

  •

  Remarkable, he wrote. Puzzling. Wondrous—

  how carriage spokes rolling past fence slats

  seem to be still or turning backward, or, better still,

  completely gone. On his desk, near medical texts

  and a swan-neck lamp, a quarter-scale

  wooden human figure catches sunlight

  •

  down its polished spine, the model

  best used for anatomy lessons

  and not as a paperweight

  keeping his entries on Time and Causation

  away from his entries on carriage wheels.

  Although paperweight is its purpose now,

  a sunlit, seated, boxwood shape

  slumped on the soft thesaurus, which, like

  history or yeast, swells with each passing hour.

  •

  The whole is unachievable, he wrote.

  Uncontainable, the catalogue and turning wheel.

  Best seen through slats and apertures, columns

  and vacancies. The rotating illusion.

  Best visited in slanted light, when the parts

  are oblique on their shadows,

  and spokes and broken syllables

  send luminous, curved lines

  that convey the impression of unbrokenness …

  Simulacra

  Before the beak of a tiny pipette

  dipped through a glisten of DNA

  and ewe quickened to ewe

  with exactly the simulacrum

  forty thousand years had worked toward,

  before Muybridge’s horses cantered

  and a ratchet-and-pawl-cast waltzing couple

  shuffled along a phasmatrope,

  before dime-size engines

  sparked in the torsos of toddler dolls

  and little bellows let them sing

  and the Unassisted Walking One—

  Miss Autoperipatetikos—stepped

  in her caterpillar gait

  across the New World’s wide-plank floor,

  before motion moved the figures, and torsion

  moved the motion—or steam, or sand,

  or candle flame—before magnets and taut springs

  nudged Gustav the Climbing Miller

  up his mill’s retaining wall (and gravity

  retrieved him), before image, like sound,

 
; stroked through an outreach of crests and troughs,

  and corresponding apertures

  caught patterns in the waves,

  caught, like eels beneath ancestral ponds,

  radiance in the energy,

  before lamposcope and zograscope,

  fantascope and panorama, before lanterns

  re-cast human hands, or a dye-drop

  of beetle first fluttered across

  a flicker book of papyrus leaves,

  someone sketched a creature along the contours

  of a cave, its stippled, monochromatic shape

  tracing the vaults and hollows,

  shivers of flank and shoulder

  already drawing absence nearer,

  as torchlight set the motion

  and shadow set the rest.

  Notes from Prehistory

  • FONT-DE-GAUME CAVE PAINTINGS, LES EYZIES, FRANCE

  •

  At Font-de-Gaume, the bison—eighty—

  bulge outward from their spindle legs

  and, quickened by candlelight, inch a half-step closer

  to flint-carved human hands and nineteen

  tectiforms. Across the cave, sketched

  to trace its contour lines, two dozen mammoths stir.

  And oxen—eight. Four capridae. One feline. (Two?)

  •

  One bear. Not white, of course, although

  calcitic film, spawned across the centuries,

  has powdered it. Not violet-mouthed. Not

  iceberg-drawn, walking past the confluence

  of James and Hudson Bays, out and out, the ice

  too sparse, a thin, chivalric cape

  laid down on the endless water.

  •

  Six varied signs. Or five. Cone. Canopy.

  Headless ampersand, swirled by lichen and manganese.

  Not nebular, those swirls, not polychrome,

  not cast in sheets across a bay, solar-flared,

  electric, green on muted red.

  One slender tri-forked cave, thin-branched as a sapling.

  One Rubicon. One terminal diverticulum.

  •

  One bear, quickened in place, stopped

  on a lozenge of stone, a shrinking,

  fissure-crafted raft, above a canopy,

  beneath an ampersand. Here—and there—

  the stone, like ice, is water-polished

  or scoured by flint to a silver sheen, scratch marks

  zigging this way and that.

  •

  Like magic, a candle’s light would shape

  the marks—erratic, pin-thin lines drawn up

  to concentric rings. Illusion, of course. Mirage.

  Not symmetry. Not grace.

  Just flint and form and a resin torch:

  to venerate the living world

  and keep the ghosts at bay.

  Dürer near Fifty

  At dawn on Saint Barbara’s Eve, just below

  the plateau of his fiftieth year, Albrecht Dürer, first

  having purchased spectacles, shoes, and an ivory button,

  rode a wheel-etched swath of longitude

  from Antwerp toward Zeeland, where a whale—

  one hundred fathoms long—pulsed on the dark sand.

  First having purchased snuffers and furnace-brown,

  and coated the pages of his silverpoint sketchbook,

  where his scratch lines—like pears, or tarnish, or thought—

  would gradually ripen, he circled Zeeland’s seven shores,

  past Goes and Wolfersdyk and the sunken place

  where rooftops stood up from the water.

  Already, from thought, he had sketched a dozen

  tail-locked sirens, and once, gossip’s composite,

  a paisleyed rhinoceros with a dorsal horn—and so

  would see firsthand a whale, having changed in Antwerp

  a Philips florin, and dined with the Portuguese,

  and studied the bones of the giant, Antigoon—

  his shoulder blade wider than a strong man’s back—

  although, in fact, the bones were whale, while the whale

  Dürer sailed toward was history, erased by degrees

  on the outgoing tide. Still, history tells us,

  from his spot on that salty prow, Dürer drew precisely

  the unseen sight: the absent arc of its sunken shape,

  the absent fluke and down-turned eye,

  even, it appears, the absent trench the acid sea

  had bitten so seamlessly back into the world.

  Sketchbook

  • DR. NICOLAAS TULP, 1635

  Because, each week, he has entered the body,

  its torso, freshly sanitized, its legs and arteries,

  the rose curve on the underchin executed so deftly

  by the hangman’s rope; because he has entered

  the forearm and cortex, the lobes and hidden

  vortices, deeper, then deeper, until what remains—

  shallow, undissected flesh—seems simple lines,

  their one dimension shadowless;

  and because he is tired and has been himself

  a subject,

  Tulp crumples his page, then tries again

  to sketch a caged orangutan. Placid, insouciant,

  the animal slips its shallow glances upward,

  downward, from the white-ruffed shape shaping it

  to the lap and simple page, as the first lines quicken

  and a ratted brow begins. There, a nostril,

  and there, a shadowing, a depth that plumps

  the cheek pouch, the finger’s wrinkled

  vortices. Slumped at their separate walls, neither

  meets the other’s eyes,

  although, equally, each

  completes the circling gaze—man to beast to page

  to man: two pelt-and-pipesmoke-scented curves,

  dimensionless, mammalian. Tick by tick

  the minutes pass, page by crumpled page.

  Beyond the door, caws and yelps and the clack

  of carriage wheels … and still they sit,

  Tulp, the ape, content to see the shapes

  they’ve known—or felt, or sensed, or turned within—

  sloughed in husks across the straw.

  Fragments from Venice:

  Albrecht Dürer

  You write for news and Venetian vellum.

  •

  I answer: From the sea today a mystery:

  proportion’s carapaced nightmare: lobster.

  •

  You write for burnt glass.

  •

  I answer: When tides cross San Marco’s cobbles,

  bare-shouldered women, bare-shouldered girls,

  walk planks to the dark cathedral.

  •

  Herr Willibald, my French mantle greets you!

  My plumes and misgivings greet you!

  Blue-black near the boiling vat, my carapaced neighbor

  greets you! (Since dusk, his thin-stalked eyes, like sunflowers,

  have tracked my orbiting candle.)

  •

  You write that my altarpiece

  cups in its wings our destinies.

  •

  I answer: In one-point perspective, all lines converge

  in a dot of sun far out on the earth’s horizon.

  •

  I answer: Nightfall makes centaurs of the gondoliers.

  •

  I answer: Afloat through the inns, a second perspective

  transposes the reign of earth and sun, placing us

  at the vanishing point.

  •

  You write that stubble on the winter fields

  supports, through frost, a second field.

  •

  I answer: When tides withdraw there are birthmarks

  on the cobbles. And on the girls’ satin slippers

  agerings of silt.

  •

  Y
ou have seen, secondhand, the centaurs.

  •

  I have seen the lobster redden,

  then rise like a sun through the boiling water.

  •

  Immortality’s sign? you ask me. That slow-gaited sea change?

  That languorous rising?

  •

  I have also seen a comet cross the sky.

  From the Sea of Tranquillity

  Item: After the hopping and gathering,

  in that flat, crepuscular light, Armstrong

  stroked to the moon’s crisp dust, it is said,

  Albrecht Dürer’s initials, first the A’s wide table,

  then beneath it, the slumped, dependable D,

  the image sinking slowly through that waterless sea,

  named less for tides than resemblances.

  •

  Item: In the year 1471, in the sixth hour

  of Saint Prudentia’s Day, Albrecht Dürer was born,

  the moon afloat in Gemini’s house, and far to the east

  Leo rising; an alliance that promised, with travel

  and wealth, a slender physique—so slender, in fact,

  Dürer slipped from it daily, as, gripped by concentration,

  someone else’s Albrecht drew a stylus down the grain.

  •

  Item: Kicked up through the moon’s pale dust, a boot

  creates not a scattering but a wave, particles joined

  in a singular motion, faithful to the shape

  of displacement. Such is the loss of atmosphere,

  although aura remains, and time. Think of two men,

  each at his milky page, thirst and the dipper

  a moment away, and the whole unbroken before them.

  Pavo

  • PAVO, N. (L. PEACOCK) A CONSTELLATION OF THE SOUTHERN SKY

  Long before the fast and truss, they named the horse

  for the mine, Pavo, drawn to the word’s pulse,

  its hoof-tap and sigh, as miners all down

  the rocky divide were drawn to the tappings and sighs,

  the mines and their names, the history they climbed

  like strata: Vulcan, Argonaut, Mayflower, Buffalo,

  Blue-Jay, Orphan Boy, Moonlight.

  Pavo, they said—

  for peacock, for copper, the peacock of ores—

  Easy, as they knotted the blindfold and draped him

  in grommeted leather, then rigged him fore-and-aft,

  back hooves toward chest, front hooves toward belly,

  then hoisted him upright to the lift’s slim cage

  and slipped him tail first through the earth,

  two, three, four thousand feet.

  One century

  before today, our cinched space and water-filled moon,

  when the adit was cut and far down the drifts