Roget's Illusion Read online

stringers of air replaced stringers of ore,

  and mystery began, as it always does—tommy-knockers

  and candle auguries—they untrussed the truss,

  refolded the blindfold, watched as he kicked three times

  then stilled,

  as filled with unknowing as they once were,

  fresh from the lift.

  Long before

  a flagpole’s weightless nib pierced the lunar dust

  and pumice shattered, and rovers flexed

  their divining rods, the miners approached

  the gaunted horse, their hair green-tinted

  from copper seep,

  their jumper coats scummed

  from some synthesis of world and rain.

  Bedrock. Primer. Seedling. Canopy … Where to begin,

  they wondered, then began as they always do,

  as they touched, then lowered, the long head,

  first to the water, then to the grain.

  Flight

  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.

  1918 Huber Light Four

  To say that it glowed,

  the tractor’s half-scale replica,

  its twenty polished woods seamless and separate

  as a tract of furrows filled with rain,

  •

  is to offer the finish before the start,

  the worm before the jig. Yet to say late sun,

  cast through the fair’s barn-turned-exhibition-hall,

  burnished it, as it burnished

  •

  the jars of yellow beets, shifts agency

  to a higher power. Three years, the woodworker said,

  two thousand hours drawing walnut’s brindled light,

  and whatever light the willow offered,

  •

  the cedar and birch, the African mahogany.

  Almost alchemy, how sanding transformed

  wood to grain. Almost chemistry: friction, air,

  vapors beneath the polish cloth—almost

  •

  complete combustion, the perfect half-scale whole of it

  clean as the flames some candles offer. Though to say

  that it drew from its absent shape,

  as candles do, suggests a labor less touched

  •

  by time, or a time less touched by absence.

  Hour by hour, something like harmony

  passed through the room, while something like melanin

  rose in the model’s polished wood,

  •

  in the Kalif dahlias and sawdust floor, then darkened

  a tabletop tapestry, the spokes of grain and braided vines

  arranged like a living wagon wheel,

  and darkened the wheel hub’s gathered quince

  •

  and a slender ripple of cornsilk wind—

  illusion’s ancient artifact:

  thin strands stretching out from a back-cast rim

  to show that a stillness was turning.

  PART TWO

  Roget’s Illusion: Two

  Before Confinement and Preservation,

  in the columns beside cart wheel and gear,

  he has written compass … windlass … hinge—

  all above Evolution but below Elevation.

  •

  And in columns beyond cart wheel and gear,

  a thousand synonyms bleat, as his weary mind,

  above revolution but below revelation,

  wishes the project penned. Even cribbed. Bound

  •

  for a thousand weary minds. The metonyms bleat

  for the animal world, just outside his window,

  cribbed, penned, bound, projected into wisdoms

  the stars align across. He stops, watches two moths,

  •

  just outside the window, whirl toward his lamp’s minimal

  light. Why try again to capture Matter or Symmetry,

  when the line he watches from stars to lamp stops

  in a moth-shaped cipher of dust?

  •

  Lamp. Matter. Symmetry. Why try again to capture

  the world? Light as compass, wind as hinge?

  All the dust-shaped moths on their word-shaped pins,

  after Confinement and before Preservation?

  The Evening Star

  Full night not yet on the Sound

  and far to the west, one brilliant, snow-filled mountain

  flares over the water toward me, its quick afterimage

  fluttering behind, part peak, part half-transparent moth

  skimming the table

  and reference books,

  stitching together the weathered lines

  where Dürer sketches Adam’s ash tree, and Kepler

  watches a dead star’s light, and someone

  named Smeaton—John—hauls a tallow-fed chandelier

  up the lighthouse steps near Plymouth.

  •

  Plump, short-winged, retinal burn, pulsing

  over the flat-lined past, reviving

  the burins and waxy Edens, the breezes and tides,

  the twenty-four half-pound chandelier candles

  slowly slipping their lighthouse beam

  down another century’s hazards.

  And then it’s gone,

  quick sprinkle of ash dusting a membrane’s rods and cones.

  Everything still, again. The sun just down, the past

  just words, and the first starlight so pale

  on the dusk, I must turn to catch it peripherally.

  Thoughts Toward the First Christmas Lecture

  • MICHAEL FARADAY, 1860

  A skin of ice on the inner panes

  and Faraday there at the window, his candle flame

  burning a peephole. Already morning has warmed

  the eaves, the hedgerows thickened by snow.

  Children, he thinks, penless, his words underscored

  by a tendril of smoke, I speak to you as a child myself,

  amazed by the candle’s phenomena: wax and light

  and uplifting air, the little cup they form together,

  the shallow pool that shivers there. Over

  an empty hummock, parallel tracks of a sleigh soften,

  and between the tracks, a horse’s widening hoofprints.

  Something has scurried across that journey—marten

  or hare—bisecting the sleigh tracks. Consider

  that grand circularity, light to fuel to light.

  And mystery: a flame that never bites the host

  but fattens from it nonetheless. Perhaps there were

  two horses, stepping in tandem down the hummock,

  one set of hoofprints absorbing the other. Children,

  we are drawn here to be philosophers, to ask always,

  What is the cause? And so you question,

  How d
o flame and fuel meet? And so I say,

  By mutual attraction. By the bonding of things

  undissolved in each other. Unlikely, of course, still

  were their gaits equal and the reins crossed

  their shoulders simultaneously… . Let us turn

  to an illustration. Tip your towel to a basin of water,

  or better—better!—trouble your mother for a fresh prawn,

  then place it tail first in a tumbler, plump head

  cupped over the rim. Children, water will climb

  through the creature—as fuel climbs a wick!—

  by mutual attraction. Already morning

  has warmed the eaves, the icicles transparent now,

  sloughing their waxy frost—and soon to be prisms,

  blinding, as the sun arcs into view. And what of the flame,

  you ask me, its shadow so solid on the classroom wall?

  How can it be both substance and light? Perhaps

  there were two horses, stepping in tandem

  down the white expanse—soon to be blinding …

  Children, I must leave you for now with this:

  Never is flame of a single body, but a multitude of

  successions, so rapid the eye unites them as one.

  Something has scurried across the sleigh tracks—

  marten or hare—its jittery flight bisecting the hummock,

  this way—or that—its slim path both absence and shape,

  a low-slung whip of smoke.

  Navigation

  Waves or Moths or whatever it is to be called.

  • VIRGINIA WOOLF

  If it is to be The Waves, then

  the moon, perhaps, weighting a sextant’s upper shelf,

  with the sea a shelf below some traveler’s feet.

  Planets, time, position line, position line—

  and the place is fixed. Invisibly.

  •

  If it is to be The Moths, then

  something about their flight. April, perhaps.

  In a window, the night-blooming horn

  of a gramophone. And over the fields,

  moths flying, holding their brief shapes

  in constant angle to a planet’s light.

  •

  If it is to be The Waves—the sextant and salt—

  then nothing to see at first but stars

  and indices. Not the wake’s pale seam.

  Not a fin or foremast. Not even

  the daylit band of the past,

  just under the earth’s horizon.

  •

  Not yet, at least. No story. (A lamp, perhaps,

  a flowerpot.) No past with its child

  stopped by a lake in her stiff shoes, toeing

  the placid water. Arm’s length before her,

  in an arc, dollops of bread bob—and beyond

  the bread, in a second arc, a dozen,

  hand-sized turtles, treading in place.

  •

  They cannot eat, the moths. (A little nectar,

  a little sap.) Mandibles gone. Just a slender,

  tubal tongue wound like a watch spring

  in their hollow throats. And, afraid, the turtles

  will not eat, the shadow of the backlit child

  rippling toward them as, one by one,

  new dollops of bread drop.

  •

  If it is to be The Waves, then

  cycles on cycles. Eternity. Plurality. (Even the rogue

  absorbed.) If it is to be The Moths, then

  singleness and brevity. Great brevity—although,

  in the leaves behind the child, they are just

  beginning to stir, the day’s late light

  •

  caught in the orbs of the early lamps.

  And what is that feeling, shaking its wings

  within her? Late day, the leaves and bread

  and urgency, all the curious curved shapes

  treading in place. If she took a step backward,

  would they, in an arc, draw nearer, as a ring

  might follow its planet? What then

  would she make of the world?

  Correlation of the Physical Forces

  • MICHAEL FARADAY

  Watched, as a child, the clockmaker, the glint

  of his iris deep in the eyepiece, like mica in a well.

  •

  Watched iron filings bristle a magnet.

  •

  In his father’s shop, watched an axle’s tip sag over an anvil.

  •

  Loved the Fens.

  •

  Loved Virgil’s words on young vines, their trellis

  of elms in the nursery field.

  •

  Considered life as a clockmaker.

  •

  Considered life as a blacksmith.

  •

  Loved, on his mother’s table, the candle-powered carousel,

  how the colts floated up on their tiny fobs as the heat rose.

  •

  Wrote with pencil in a leather-bound notebook:

  “Soap bubbles.” “Balloon.”

  •

  Wrote: “Refer to the last lecture.”

  •

  Wrote: “Respiration and its analogy

  to the burning of a candle.”

  •

  Considered Virgil’s vines, transplanted.

  •

  Considered the empty elms, each knife-notched

  to show where the vines once faced.

  •

  Inducted electrical currents. (Seven halfpence, seven

  rounds of zinc, six paper discs moistened by salted water.)

  •

  Refuted, through science, séance table-turning.

  •

  Saw, through Virgil, notched elms as the map

  for a parallel planting.

  •

  Understood, as a child, the hiss of a candle’s wick.

  •

  Understood the clockmaker’s words: verge, escapement.

  •

  Loved electromagnetism, “The constant circling of a wire

  round a magnet and a magnet round a wire.”

  •

  Loved the lack of escapement there, each

  neither dragging the other nor leaving it behind.

  •

  Saw, through Virgil, notched elms as the tracks

  of a cogged wheel.

  •

  Saw, through time, “The idea of them as they dwell in matter.”

  •

  Wrote in a blue-green notebook: “Carbon.” “Cathode.”

  “Cannot.” “Cannot.” “However exalted they may be.”

  •

  Wrote: “We shall today.” “For a little while.”

  •

  Wrote: “Correlation of the physical forces.”

  Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice

  • AFTER THE PAINTING BY PIETRO LONGHI, C. 1751

  To the tumbler settling on the sawdust street,

  with its flames and hoops and carnival swords

  •

  swirling up like an alchemist’s galaxy, this quiet scene,

  glimpsed through a stable’s open doors, seems at first

  •

  a pond—wall-locked, opaque, lit from above

  by the upreaching arc of a white swan.

  •

  Then his eyes adjust and the pond is a dampened

  stable floor, one ruffle of black rhinoceros. And who

  •

  would step forth to restrain him,

  if he slipped on his hands and tumbler’s knees

  •

  in through that black expanse? Or rolled

  in a patchwork somersault

  •

  like a moon in its blue orbit, while

  the swan slowly shifted from beak and wing

  •

  to a gaggle of white-masked spectators, mute in the muted
/>   light? Who would object if he nestled beside

  •

  that nobility, that count, that willowy, pale contessa

  whose throat and white breast

  •

  first gave to his eyes a swan’s neck? From her perch

  near a waist-high wall, she is watching

  •

  a black-cloaked domino, the dip of his tricornered hat

  as he bends to the still rhinoceros,

  •

  the wall a border he leans across. And who

  would not quicken, as the tumbler does

  •

  in his froth of sawdust and shadow, when

  the beast slowly raises its earthen mass,

  •

  its dusty, furrowed, thick-skinned snout, where

  a flag of summer wheat dangles? Just over

  •

  its plated hull, just over its rheumy, upturned eyes,

  the eyes of the domino hover, dim, plated

  •

  in silk, pale as hoops

  afloat in some future’s flat-lit sky.

  •

  Dominance? Challenge? A courtship display?

  Who would not wonder what the animal sees

  •

  in the white-masked face of such

  facelessness, as its toes slowly spread

  •

  on the dampened floor, and a shiver of wheat

  rises and falls with its breathing?

  Accountancy: Dürer in Antwerp

  This many times have I dined with the Factor ///////,

  thus often with Stecher , thus with my Lords /////.

  (I am drawn to the fishes. And to citrons—sugared,

  like frost over gem stones.)

  •

  In trade for my portraits, I have taken

  a branch of white coral, a cedarwood rosary, an ounce

  of good ultramarine. And a great fish scale

  that gauzes the day through its intricate lens.

  •

  This many times have mummers amused me ////.

  •

  Fourteen stuivers, to date, for raisins. Two for a brush.

  One for a buffalo horn. Twenty florins in all

  for firewood, flax, one elk’s hoof, one parrot cage.

  In December, four florins—gold—for a little baboon

  •

  who nods like Erasmus when darkness descends.

  There is solace, I find, in accountancy,

  the prudent, resonant thrift of an evening’s meal

  preserved in a slant mark, like the solace I feel

  •

  with needle and ink, Time’s cantering beast

  furred for eternity by a burin’s bite.

  •

  To Johann, one Passion. To the surgeon

  and house servant, each, a Life of Our Lady.

  To Konrad, in service of the Emperor’s daughter,

  one Melancholy, three Marys, a Eustace, a Nemesis,

  a Jerome in His Cell. (Arranged on a wall,

  these gifts might mirror our human progression,