by Linda Bierds
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
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Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2014 by Linda Bierds
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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
