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Roget's Illusion

Page 5

by Linda Bierds


  •

  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.

  •

  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

  •

  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.

 

 

 


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