by Linda Bierds
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across the Channel, the guns of Flanders softly pop.
The time in painting two is here—and here—a classic, transient
shape, a knock-down now forever shattered and regathered.
The white pierrot leans slightly forward, his lover—here
•
and here a classic, transient shape—leans slightly back.
It’s Venice, evening, moonlight pale on a black canal.
The Brighton pierrot leans forward slightly, dragging
his oiled form across a brushstroke of air.
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It’s England, evening, moonlight pale on the black channel… .
And beyond the frames but within the moment, something stutters
homeward, dragging an oily line across the prop-stroked air
or swimming in circles down a shoreless canal.
•
Beyond the frames but within the moment, something stutters
homeward—toward some perfect, restive memory, some lost hush
drifting in circles through a shoreless now.
Within the prop-and paw-fed strokes, beyond
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the hush, the silent, restive harmony,
past the wooden stage and beach chairs, the slouched pierrots,
out from the prop-and paw-fed lappings, still
it struggles on. The last of our wars is desire.
The Shepherd’s Horn
I am imagining how it would be if we could infuse souls.
• VIRGINIA WOOLF
I.
Then moonlight burned through the low fog
and back he came, the gondolier, first
head and torso bent over the long oar, then
black shoes, soft on the stern’s worn track.
And Wagner, his back to the prow, saw it all
as a slow unveiling, the figure moving
his huge sweep and, behind him, the spires
and funnel-shaped chimneys, then the marbled walls
and porticoes, then at last, all along the canal,
the black-cast, algae-slick stairs, stepping
down through the lapping water. And then,
Wagner wrote, sound drew what moonlight had drawn:
From the gondolier a wail began, not unlike the cry
of an animal, and slowly strengthened and formed itself
from long-drawn “Oh!” to the simple notes “Venezia.”
And the sound, Wagner wrote, revealed the place,
and the place the past, and the past the echo
that, like the watery sweep of an oar, carried him
backward into the future and became, in turn,
the long-drawn wail of the shepherd’s horn
at the launch of Tristan’s third act.
II.
A meadow, with sheep.
Lifting the gramophone’s ebony arm,
Leonard said how the horn, the shepherd’s horn,
once again brought back his childhood.
And the painting, high on the dining room wall,
a meadow, with sheep. And although Wagner’s opera
rejects the daylit world, its false revelations, still,
Leonard said, the horn recalls that daylit scene,
widening as the note holds—how, here and there,
paint buckled like sealing wax and textured
the sheep. Then the real sunlight, how it brought
from the wooden floor a dozen amber currents,
and, from the carpet where he sat, a woolen garden.
III.
Blank. The land today was a canvas,
blank. No shepherd, no sheep. Just frost.
Burning white, Virginia said. Burning blue.
Then the elms, red. And what was that phrase
she forgot to remember? Look your last
on all things lovely. The war brings a sharp,
immediate sorrow. Tavistock Square is no more.
It swells, then fades, as urgent sorrow must.
Then through a shallow wash of sunlight,
high on a slender elm, some deeper, cosmic sadness
opens its blunt wings. Then it too … somehow … lifts.
Red, purple, dove blue grey. I did not mean
to describe, once more, she said, the downs in snow.
But it came.
IV.
His childhood garden seemed touched by snow,
although it was August, each long-abandoned brittle stalk
chafed to dust. No sound as he stood there, Leonard said,
no wind. He was five. The grimy ivy drooped
on the grimy walls. And across the walls,
from leaf to leaf, were dozens and dozens
of spiderwebs, each pocked by a bead of spider.
And it came to him then for the first time,
that cosmic sorrow she mentioned—when
all of the windows are dark down the street,
and the dust is unmoving,
and desire fails.
V.
To transcend desire, Tristan said, transcend
the world. Then Wagner placed him in a castle garden,
under a lime tree, downstage from a castle gate,
and said to him, Now you are home,
amidst your meadows and delights, in the light
of the old sun. And Tristan answered,
Is there any anguish
which it does not revive in its beams?
VI.
Then it too … somehow … lifts.
VII.
Why try again to make the familiar catalogue?
The frost, the elms, the colors, red, blue, dove grey?
She had written, Virginia said, Last night
a great heavy plunge of bomb under the window—
and then, directly thereafter, of the elm tree’s leaves
against the sky, of the cows feeding, of the pear tree
swagged with pears. Beauty. Pity. Why try again
to make the familiar catalogue,
from which something always escapes?
VIII.
From which something always escapes.
And shall they listen again to the opera’s first notes,
their rise and fall, like long oars inching a ship
toward Cornwall? And did he remember their walk
years ago?—the line of straw they placed near the river
to measure its height. Fog, thick on the water.
A boatman’s voice, far down the towpath.
Why try again? Morning. Rooks in the trees.
How she had written, The deer exactly match
the bracken. And then they do not. How over the water
a horn sounded, then a deer escaped its camouflage
and fled up the steep embankment.
For better or worse, beauty or pity—did he remember?—
how that bounding shape broke free.
