Roget's Illusion (2 page)

At dawn on Saint Barbara's Eve, just below

the plateau of his fiftieth year, Albrecht Dürer, first

having purchased spectacles, shoes, and an ivory button,

rode a wheel-etched swath of longitude

from Antwerp toward Zeeland, where a whale—

one hundred fathoms long
—pulsed on the dark sand.

First having purchased snuffers and furnace-brown,

and coated the pages of his silverpoint sketchbook,

where his scratch lines—like pears, or tarnish, or thought—

would gradually ripen, he circled Zeeland's seven shores,

past Goes and Wolfersdyk and
the sunken place

where rooftops stood up from the water.

Already, from thought, he had sketched a dozen

tail-locked sirens, and once, gossip's composite,

a paisleyed rhinoceros with a dorsal horn—and so

would see firsthand a whale, having changed in Antwerp

a Philips florin, and dined with the Portuguese,

and studied the bones of the giant, Antigoon—

his shoulder blade wider than a strong man's back
—

although, in fact, the bones were whale, while the whale

Dürer sailed toward was history, erased by degrees

on the outgoing tide. Still, history tells us,

from his spot on that salty prow, Dürer drew precisely

the unseen sight: the absent arc of its sunken shape,

the absent fluke and down-turned eye,

even, it appears, the absent trench the acid sea

had bitten so seamlessly back into the world.

• DR. NICOLAAS TULP, 1635

Because, each week, he has entered the body,

its torso, freshly sanitized, its legs and arteries,

the rose curve on the underchin executed so deftly

by the hangman's rope; because he has entered

the forearm and cortex, the lobes and hidden

vortices, deeper, then deeper, until what remains—

shallow, undissected flesh—seems simple lines,

their one dimension shadowless;

and because he is tired and has been himself

a subject,

Tulp crumples his page, then tries again

to sketch a caged orangutan. Placid, insouciant,

the animal slips its shallow glances upward,

downward, from the white-ruffed shape shaping it

to the lap and simple page, as the first lines quicken

and a ratted brow begins. There, a nostril,

and there, a shadowing, a depth that plumps

the cheek pouch, the finger's wrinkled

vortices. Slumped at their separate walls, neither

meets the other's eyes,

although, equally, each

completes the circling gaze—man to beast to page

to man: two pelt-and-pipesmoke-scented curves,

dimensionless, mammalian. Tick by tick

the minutes pass, page by crumpled page.

Beyond the door, caws and yelps and the clack

of carriage wheels . . . and still they sit,

Tulp, the ape, content to see the shapes

they've known—or felt, or sensed, or turned within—

sloughed in husks across the straw.

You write for news and Venetian vellum.

•

I answer: From the sea today a mystery:

proportion's carapaced nightmare: lobster.

•

You write for burnt glass.

•

I answer: When tides cross San Marco's cobbles,

bare-shouldered women, bare-shouldered girls,

walk planks to the dark cathedral.

•

Herr Willibald, my French mantle greets you!

My plumes and misgivings greet you!

Blue-black near the boiling vat, my carapaced neighbor

greets you! (Since dusk, his thin-stalked eyes, like sunflowers,

have tracked my orbiting candle.)

•

You write that my altarpiece

cups in its wings our destinies.

•

I answer: In one-point perspective, all lines converge

in a dot of sun far out on the earth's horizon.

•

I answer: Nightfall makes centaurs of the gondoliers.

•

I answer: Afloat through the inns, a second perspective

transposes the reign of earth and sun, placing
us

at the vanishing point.

•

You write that stubble on the winter fields

supports, through frost, a second field.

•

I answer: When tides withdraw there are birthmarks

on the cobbles. And on the girls' satin slippers

age-rings of silt.

•

You have seen, secondhand, the centaurs.

•

I have seen the lobster redden,

then rise like a sun through the boiling water.

•

Immortality's sign? you ask me. That slow-gaited sea change?

That languorous rising?

•

I have also seen a comet cross the sky.

Item: After the hopping and gathering,

in that flat, crepuscular light, Armstrong

stroked to the moon's crisp dust, it is said,

Albrecht Dürer's initials, first the A's wide table,

then beneath it, the slumped, dependable D,

the image sinking slowly through that waterless sea,

named less for tides than resemblances.

•

Item: In the year 1471, in the sixth hour

of Saint Prudentia's Day, Albrecht Dürer was born,

the moon afloat in Gemini's house, and far to the east

Leo rising; an alliance that promised, with travel

and wealth, a slender physique—so slender, in fact,

Dürer slipped from it daily, as, gripped by concentration,

someone else's Albrecht drew a stylus down the grain.

•

Item: Kicked up through the moon's pale dust, a boot

creates not a scattering but a wave, particles joined

in a singular motion, faithful to the shape

of displacement. Such is the loss of atmosphere,

although aura remains, and time. Think of two men,

each at his milky page, thirst and the dipper

a moment away, and the whole unbroken before them.

• PAVO, N. (L.
PEACOC
K
) A CONSTELLATION OF THE SOUTHERN SKY

Long before the fast and truss, they named the horse

for the mine, Pavo, drawn to the word's pulse,

its hoof-tap and sigh, as miners all down

the rocky divide were drawn to the tappings and sighs,

the mines and their names, the history they climbed

like strata: Vulcan, Argonaut, Mayflower, Buffalo,

Blue-Jay, Orphan Boy, Moonlight.

   Pavo,
they said—

for peacock, for copper, the peacock of ores—

Easy,
as they knotted the blindfold and draped him

in grommeted leather, then rigged him fore-and-aft,

back hooves toward chest, front hooves toward belly,

then hoisted him upright to the lift's slim cage

and slipped him tail first through the earth,

two, three, four thousand feet.

One century

before today, our cinched space and water-filled moon,

when the adit was cut and far down the drifts

stringers of air replaced stringers of ore,

and mystery began, as it always does—tommy-knockers

and candle auguries—they untrussed the truss,

refolded the blindfold, watched as he kicked three times

then stilled,

as filled with unknowing as they once were,

fresh from the lift.

   Long before

a flagpole's weightless nib pierced the lunar dust

and pumice shattered, and rovers flexed

their divining rods, the miners approached

the gaunted horse, their hair green-tinted

from copper seep,

their jumper coats scummed

from some synthesis of world and rain.

Bedrock. Primer. Seedling. Canopy
 . . . Where to begin,

they wondered, then began as they always do,

as they touched, then lowered, the long head,

first to the water, then to the grain.

Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic—

back from bone the echoes stroke, back

from the halved heart, the lungs

three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills.

From a leather chaise, the astronaut's withered legs

dangle, as back they come, sounds

a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape.

The physician cocks his head and taps—exactly

as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock

chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved

•

and halved, until a roof appears, black as space.

I'm gaining ground, he says, the astronaut,

who knows, from space, earth is just a blue-green glow,

a pilot light he circled once, lifted, swiftly flown

above the rafters and atmospheres, half himself

and half again some metamorphic click,

extinct as memory. I'm gaining ground,

he says, and back it comes, his glint

of cloud-crossed world: a pilot light

or swaddled leaf, green in the season's infancy.

To say that it glowed,

the tractor's half-scale replica,

its twenty polished woods seamless and separate

as a tract of furrows filled with rain,

•

is to offer the finish before the start,

the worm before the jig. Yet to say late sun,

cast through the fair's barn-turned-exhibition-hall,

burnished it, as it burnished

•

the jars of yellow beets, shifts agency

to a higher power. Three years, the woodworker said,

two thousand hours drawing walnut's brindled light,

and whatever light the willow offered,

•

the cedar and birch, the African mahogany.

Almost alchemy, how sanding transformed

wood to grain. Almost chemistry: friction, air,

vapors beneath the polish cloth—almost

•

complete combustion, the perfect half-scale whole of it

clean as the flames some candles offer. Though to say

that it drew from its absent shape,

as candles do, suggests a labor less touched

•

by time, or a time less touched by absence.

Hour by hour, something like harmony

passed through the room, while something like melanin

rose in the model's polished wood,

•

in the Kalif dahlias and sawdust floor, then darkened

a tabletop tapestry, the spokes of grain and braided vines

arranged like a living wagon wheel,

and darkened the wheel hub's gathered quince

•

and a slender ripple of cornsilk wind—

illusion's ancient artifact:

thin strands stretching out from a back-cast rim

to show that a stillness was turning.

Before
Confinement
and
Preservation
,

in the columns beside
cart wheel
and
gear
,

he has written
compass . . . windlass . . . hinge
—

all above
Evolution
but below
Elevation
.

•

And in columns beyond
cart wheel
and
gear
,

a thousand synonyms bleat, as his weary mind,

above revolution but below revelation,

wishes the project penned. Even cribbed. Bound

•

for a thousand weary minds. The metonyms bleat

for the animal world, just outside his window,

cribbed, penned, bound, projected into wisdoms

the stars align across. He stops, watches two moths,

•

just outside the window, whirl toward his lamp's minimal

light. Why try again to capture
Matter
or
Symmetry
,

when the line he watches from stars to lamp stops

in a moth-shaped cipher of dust?

•

Lamp. Matter. Symmetry. Why try again to capture

the world? Light as compass, wind as hinge?

All the dust-shaped moths on their word-shaped pins,

after
Confinement
and before
Preservation
?

Full night not yet on the Sound

and far to the west, one brilliant, snow-filled mountain

flares over the water toward me, its quick afterimage

fluttering behind, part peak, part half-transparent moth

skimming the table

and reference books,

stitching together the weathered lines

where Dürer sketches Adam's ash tree, and Kepler

watches a dead star's light, and someone

named Smeaton—John—hauls a tallow-fed chandelier

up the lighthouse steps near Plymouth.

•

Plump, short-winged, retinal burn, pulsing

over the flat-lined past, reviving

the burins and waxy Edens, the breezes and tides,

the twenty-four half-pound chandelier candles

slowly slipping their lighthouse beam

down another century's hazards.

And then it's gone,

quick sprinkle of ash dusting a membrane's rods and cones.

Everything still, again. The sun just down, the past

just words, and the first starlight so pale

on the dusk, I must turn to catch it peripherally.

• MICHAEL FARADAY, 1860

A skin of ice on the inner panes

and Faraday there at the window, his candle flame

burning a peephole. Already morning has warmed

the eaves, the hedgerows thickened by snow.

Children,
he thinks, penless, his words underscored

by a tendril of smoke,
I speak to you as a child myself,

amazed by the candle's phenomena: wax and light

and uplifting air, the little cup they form together,

the shallow pool that shivers there.
Over

an empty hummock, parallel tracks of a sleigh soften,

and between the tracks, a horse's widening hoofprints.

Something has scurried across that journey—marten

or hare—bisecting the sleigh tracks.
Consider

that grand circularity, light to fuel to light.

And mystery: a flame that never bites the host

but fattens from it nonetheless.
Perhaps there were

two horses, stepping in tandem down the hummock,

one set of hoofprints absorbing the other.
Children,

we are drawn here to be philosophers, to ask always,

What is the cause? And so you question,

How do flame and fuel meet? And so I say,

By mutual attraction. By the bonding of things

undissolved in each other.
Unlikely, of course, still

were their gaits equal and the reins crossed

their shoulders simultaneously. . . .
Let us turn

to an illustration. Tip your towel to a basin of water,

or better—better!—trouble your mother for a fresh prawn,

then place it tail first in a tumbler, plump head

cupped over the rim. Children, water will climb

through the creature—as fuel climbs a wick!—

by mutual attraction.
Already morning

has warmed the eaves, the icicles transparent now,

sloughing their waxy frost—and soon to be prisms,

blinding, as the sun arcs into view.
And what of the flame,

you ask me, its shadow so solid on the classroom wall?

How can it be both substance and light?
Perhaps

there were two horses, stepping in tandem

down the white expanse—soon to be blinding . . .

Children, I must leave you for now with this:

Never is flame of a single body, but a multitude of

successions, so rapid the eye unites them as one.

Something has scurried across the sleigh tracks—

marten or hare—its jittery flight bisecting the hummock,

this way—or that—its slim path both absence and shape,

a low-slung whip of smoke.