Roget's Illusion
Authors: 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
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
USA ⢠Canada ⢠UK ⢠Ireland ⢠Australia ⢠New Zealand ⢠India ⢠South Africa ⢠China
A Penguin Random House Company
Copyright © 2014 by Linda Bierds
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
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'.54âdc23 201303715
Version_1
Once again, for Sydney
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).
Fragments from Venice: Albrecht Dürer
Thoughts Toward the First Christmas Lecture
Correlation of the Physical Forces
Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice
Accountancy: Dürer in Antwerp
Details Depicted: Insect and Hair
⢠PETER MARK ROGET, 1779â1869
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.
â¢
Remarkable,
he wrote.
Puzzling. Wondrous
â
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
â¢
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.
â¢
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 . . .
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 Oneâ
Miss Autoperipatetikosâstepped
in her caterpillar gait
across the New World's wide-plank floor,
before motion moved the figures, and torsion
moved the motionâor steam, or sand,
or candle flameâbefore 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.
⢠FONT-DE-GAUME CAVE PAINTINGS, LES EYZIES, FRANCE
â¢
At Font-de-Gaume, the bisonâeightyâ
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 oxenâeight. Four capridae. One feline. (Two?)
â¢
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.
â¢
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.
â¢
One bear, quickened in place, stopped
on a lozenge of stone, a shrinking,
fissure-crafted raft, above a canopy,
beneath an ampersand. Hereâand thereâ
the stone, like ice, is water-polished
or scoured by flint to a silver sheen, scratch marks
zigging this way and that.
â¢
Like magic, a candle's light would shape
the marksâerratic, 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.