by Linda Bierds
as the Great Procession of Our Lady’s Assumption—/—
mirrored our ranks, butcher to saint.)
•
This many times has a fever consumed me /////.
I have dined again // with my Lords.
•
At the Feast of Our Lady’s Assumption, just after
Craftsmen in the Great Procession, but before Prophets
and an armored Saint George, came a crowd of widows
garbed in white linen, accounting for losses amongst us.
Silent, in step, they seemed not shape but vacancy,
•
alit between mason and seamstress, foot soldier and clerk.
They seemed the space an etch mark frees,
the empty trough that shape awaits.
Grand day, carmine and boot-black and the swirling
world. And those stately widows
defining our borders? These times
did their passing enfold me ///////////////////////////////.
Biography
To the dedicated listener, two sounds prevailed that night:
from rafters above the Grand Canal, pigeon snores,
and from the murky water, the tap of gondolas,
like empty walnut shells, against the water steps.
A January Wednesday, 1894, and through those
parenthetic sounds, a figure, Constance Woolson—
novelist, great friend to Henry James—leapt
to her death.
She fell.
Depressed—delirious, demented—she died of—influenza—
loving him. Of unrequited love for James? There is no
evidence. Seven years before that night, mid-April
through late May, they shared a home in Bellosguardo.
A villa. Voluminous. Then met in Geneva, secretly.
Secretly? Perhaps, although discretion ruled, not
impropriety.
No impropriety? Agreed, although
what ruled was vanity, his need for her devotion.
A spinster, deaf—in just one ear—and elderly—a mere
three years his senior—she was for him primarily a …
source—think Alice, Tita, Cornelia, May—
yes, a loyal friend, of course, but …
Knowing
her death was suicide, James “utterly collapsed.”
He could not know, although he suffered, yes. And moved
into her empty rooms, into her empty beds, in Venice, then
in Oxford. He sought her ghost—as you do now.
She took herself away—There is no evidence—
away from his possession,
he who so valued possession.
What is biography? What did he mourn? Analysis?
Appropriation? She slipped away, as he has slipped
from you. Anecdote and intuition? Some weeks beyond
her death, by gondola, James ferried her dresses
to the wide lagoon and, one by one—Reverence?
Devotion?—
lowered them into the water.
They floated back, and back, he said—Hearsay?
Secondhand remembrance?—like ghastly, black
balloons, empty and full simultaneously;
although, through salt, silt, and the turning years,
their tidal scrape against the weave—
Reciprocal immortality?—there is no evidence.
From Campalto
We entered Venice by Casa degli Spiriti.
• CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON
Imagine a white horse, alone in a watery meadow.
Or, alone in a watery meadow, imagine
a white horse. The latter increases your need for me,
your relief in my company, as we walk together
down the story’s thin lanes, circling the meadow
and lolling horse, and the gondoliers on the landing
bicker and smoke and shuffle their soft-backed cards.
We have, you as my character and I as your guide,
crossed from Venice on the wide lagoon—
rib-cage deep but for trenches the ships slip through—
and we look toward it now, as one by one
its spires sink through a white fog, that, like your need,
advances.
To keep me beside you, you speak
of da Vinci’s menagerie and the grape skins
best suited for grappa. You would question my friendship
with Henry James—you had hoped, in fact,
for Henry James—but I have grown singular here,
essential to you as our gondoliers, although
they’ve turned silent, fog-erased, and beacon us closer
by nothing but pipesmoke and their cards’ arrhythmic
purr. You would ask of his manner, his temperament,
the nature of our fidelity—two writers enamored
with fiction’s grip—of my life in his presence,
of my life in his shadow,
but are grateful instead
to watch as I pock our trench with pilings
and we feel our way back through the pale lagoon,
column by column, much as the blind
might track the cairns on an ancient path.
You are frightened, I know, in those intervals
when our hands break free and we float
into nothingness. And, yes, I have kept this from you:
increasingly, as the page fills, I am the fabric
of nothingness. You would ask of his voice
and fashion, the nature of our fidelity,
but out from the white fog, here is Casa degli Spiriti,
where up you swing from the swaying boat
and that which remains absorbs me.
Girl in a Dove-Gray Dress
When their slim pirogue slipped over the trapper trails,
through salt marsh and tupelo swamps, out
through inlets and broken bayous, Joseph Mason,
Audubon’s border boy, who could paint the backdrops
but not the birds, the surround but not the subject,
•
cut blossoms from low-hanging branches, filling
the prow. At thirteen (although some said eighteen),
he knew the sea but not the inlets. From rumor
and warped maps, he knew the routes, past branches
and pilings thick with birds—more each day, more
•
than a single life could paint—he knew the routes
but not the journey, the mission but not the compromise:
The Birds of America abridged by abundance.
Large for his age, or small, what did he know
of compromise? Or of Audubon, slumped
•
in the stern, neck stretched down
toward his silent flute, like a great heron
bent forever down an elephant folio? What did he know
of the whole, lessened? How vision, on its path
from the mind to the world, dissipates? For him,
•
the oak on the shore was the oak on the page.
(But not the waterlogged banyan, its roots
limbs, its shape too reversed for the untrained eye.)
Dead just before forty, he had loved the flat pirogue,
the sleek, mottled, tapered skin that swept him
•
so weightlessly over the water. And graphite. Chalk.
How paper could hold what held the birds.
He had loved the ibis. And the belladonna—Its lift
like a dark cape! (Although what he loved was flight,
not word—and neither within his reach.) As Audubon rallied,
•
caught what he could, from crane to a speckle
of kinglet, Joseph braided their vine-filled atmospheres,
over then under, in the style of the woven, there
then not
, in the style of the frame. Dead long before
forty, his life half absorbed by settings,
•
he was drawn at last by sitters: the dual exchange
of portraiture. Merchants. Matrons. Then his best,
a child in a dove-gray dress. And although
he rendered her backdrop badly—sewing box
and books stretched out of perspective—
•
he painted her face with the same precision
he gave to a cut flower, when all he knew of abundance
was filling the prow: an oval of matte, magnolia light,
and, as shadow just starting along one edge,
the slender scorch of compromise the living carry.
Meriwether and the Magpie
Did he know the one as sorrow, the one
he held, gunshot-fallen, its
remarkable long tale … beautifully variagated?
•
For the viewer, fate’s in the numbers, legend says:
One magpie for sorrow, two for mirth,
three for a wedding, four for a birth …
•
And wedded in their way they were—Lewis, the bird—
their fragile union finalized with a narrow ring
of yellowish black just at the rim of the bird’s dim eye.
•
September. Morning. A breeze
through the aspens, fine. (Five for silver, six for gold … )
Two centuries still, until language could cup,
•
in the binary digits of zero and one, all
it could name. And so he cupped the bird,
and framed in script its glossy frame:
•
the belly is of a beatifull white … the wings …
party coloured … changeable … sonetimes presenting as …
orange yellow to different exposures of ligt.
•
Time still, until sorrow’s variegated wing
would bisect the land, would sever from the whole
each singular figure. Here was wonder,
•
chipped from the western sky, its legs and taloned toes,
black and imbricated, the shifting tint of its shape,
particolored, changeable. (Seven for a secret not to be told.)
•
The wings have nineteen feathers … it’s usual food
is flesh … beautifull … yellow … a redish indigo blue …
at this season single as the halks.
•
September, the little rhyme fluttering above him,
dragging in from the far Atlantic its swift, domestic echo.
Did he wonder, then, why the story closed so suddenly?
•
(Eight for heaven, nine for hell, and ten
for the devil’s own self.) Why abundance alone
could stop the heart’s progression?
•
Morning. Nine’s beak, eight’s weightless wings.
Then ten, heartless with promise, sets down
on a dipping branch, the click of its digits—
•
black and imbricated—beginning
the cycle again: the one and then the nothing
from which the one sets forth.
Incomplete Lioness
Or lion. Too little marble left for certainty:
affixed to a bonelike armature, just a flank
and scored shoulder, and far down the missing,
crouching shape, a single, splay-toed paw.
The companion, or mate, is better formed
and offers a template to trace a bit, image to absence
to memory, until the lioness fills.
•
The exhibit is Fragments and Dislocations:
Sight and Sightlessness. Across the room
in Renaissance, the painter, retinas tattered
as a saint’s hem, might have filled the lioness
differently: absence first, then memory,
and then the lines around his own vision, its crags
•
and wilderness. His century failed him,
a placard says. Just eyelid balms
and powdered rhubarb. What retina remained
must have caught the subject’s chosen states—penitence
and ecstasy—nearsightedly, which would explain
the perfect stones, less perfect trees. Or perhaps
his partial sightlessness was corneal, and thus
•
the painting’s mood, front-lit through gauze.
In either case, what the painter knew—that his saint
and tiny crucifix would not adorn an altarpiece—
comes to us more slowly. Wood grains,
punch patterns, and the small keyhole
beneath a varnished leaf, suggest a sacristy cupboard,
•
not worship’s place, but preservation’s.
Chosen states, the placard said.
Vacancy and memory. Ecstasy and penitence.
And then, His partial vision of the whole
produced a partial masterpiece:
a saint—Jerome—and grizzled robe, flawless
in its dust. The rest is incomplete, but zero-mass
•
radiography, its lights and darks reversed,
reveals a shape beneath the scene:
Jerome as just two simple lines, white arc
across white axis—before they both were white-washed over, and the saint began,
and umber brought the lion to him.
On Reflection
• MICHAEL FARADAY
I will never contain the whole of it, he said,
the mirror too small for the long-necked lamp
floating swanlike near the angle of incidence.
Never, he said, stepping back from the lectern
•
and long-necked lamp, the mirror he held too small
for the swan. To reflect the object entirely,
he said, stepping back to the lectern,
the glass must be half the source’s height.
•
To reflect the object entirely—the lamp,
or a swan, or my figure before you—
the glass must be half the source’s height.
Unlike thought, which easily triples the whole.
•
My figure before you, the lamp’s swan,
reflects my object entirely; that is, unlike
thought, which easily triples—or transforms—the whole,
the mirror is bound by harmony.
•
Entirely. Unlike the object reflected.
Finally, when you back away from the glass, your image—
the mirror is bound by harmony—
always doubles the distance between you.
•
As it finally backs away through the glass,
light doubling its loss through angles of reflection,
your image doubles the distance between you—always
twice as far from the source as you are before it:
•
Like a thought doubly lost through an act of reflection
floating swanlike past its angle of incidence,
twice as far from its mate as a lamp from a mirror
that will never contain the whole of it.
PART THREE
Roget’s Illusion: Three
In Roget’s first edition, slimmer by half
than this last, the whole is closer to folly,
the part to wisdom, the start to the close,
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although, short or long, the journey’s the same—
begin with Existence and end in the cloisters—
and, early or late, Space, Matter,
Sensation, Volition, like navigable stars,
direct us, expansion by expansion.
•
when a sudden breeze crossed over my desk,
the 19th century’s yellowed pages lifted like wings,
the later version flapping behind, a tissue-thin flurry
of words spinning into their antonyms.
•
Then everything settled
back into neighboring columns: birth
and cessation, advent and flight, source
•
and consequence. In a work of this nature,
Roget wrote—the cocoon of language forever
swelling—Perfection exists as far
from Attainment as deity from galaxy.
But not far at all from Imperfection.
•
Or Blemish. Or Bane. List beside list,
like rain-filled furrows they shape each other—
and together hatch, just between blight
and flawlessness, a rust-tipped moth
that sips from each continually.
Steller’s Jay
• GEORG STELLER, THE AMERICAN EXPEDITION, 1742
From the Harbor of Apostles Peter and Paul,
we sailed in their namesakes, St. Peter
with its groats and falconets, St. Paul
with its groats and falconets,
then ship and ship in a topgallant wind
bearing east-southeast together, identical to the distant eye
as glimmer and reflection.
••••••••••••
When we shall wish to speak to you, Captain—and Captain—
to warn you or guide you or follow or precede you,
we shall, through pennants, jacks, drums, bells,
lanterns, guns, and speaking horns,
deliver a language precise as script,
through which may God preserve us.
••••••••••••
Light rain. Open sea.
•
I think of the rhumb we have set for ourselves
as ice upon a pin tip: point and course
interchangeable.
Now and then,
from the pitch pot, the faintest scent of pine.
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St. Paul in the east all morning.
••••••••••••
If we should desire that you take the lead …
If you should desire to lower the yards …
If it is desired to anchor in fog …
If we should separate—
from which misfortune may God preserve us …
If after three days …
If from the flagstaff a blue flag …
If in sailing close-hauled or free …
••••••••••••
What good is structure against a world
already structured by chaos? What good,
pattern, sequence, formation, formality?
We lost the St. Paul on the sixteenth day,
though we sensed thereafter a parallel presence.
