Roget's Illusion

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

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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'.54—dc23 201303715

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).

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

• 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 . . .

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.

• 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.