Roget's Illusion (4 page)

When their slim pirogue slipped over the trapper trails,

through salt marsh and tupelo swamps, out

through inlets and broken bayous, Joseph Mason,

Audubon's border boy, who could paint the backdrops

but not the birds, the surround but not the subject,

•

cut blossoms from low-hanging branches, filling

the prow. At thirteen (although some said eighteen),

he knew the sea but not the inlets. From rumor

and warped maps, he knew the routes, past branches

and pilings thick with birds—more each day, more

•

than a single life could paint—he knew the routes

but not the journey, the mission but not the compromise:

The Birds of America
abridged by abundance.

Large for his age, or small, what did he know

of compromise? Or of Audubon, slumped

•

in the stern, neck stretched down

toward his silent flute, like a great heron

bent forever down an elephant folio? What did he know

of the whole, lessened? How vision, on its path

from the mind to the world, dissipates? For him,

•

the oak on the shore was the oak on the page.

(But not the waterlogged banyan, its roots

limbs, its shape too reversed for the untrained eye.)

Dead just before forty, he had loved the flat pirogue,

the sleek, mottled, tapered skin that swept him

•

so weightlessly over the water. And graphite. Chalk.

How paper could hold what held the birds.

He had loved the ibis. And the belladonna—
Its lift

like a dark cape!
(Although what he loved was flight,

not word—and neither within his reach.) As Audubon rallied,

•

caught what he could, from crane to a speckle

of kinglet, Joseph braided their vine-filled atmospheres,

over then under, in the style of the woven, there

then not, in the style of the frame. Dead long before

forty, his life half absorbed by settings,

•

he was drawn at last by sitters: the dual exchange

of portraiture. Merchants. Matrons. Then his best,

a child in a dove-gray dress. And although

he rendered her backdrop badly—sewing box

and books stretched out of perspective—

•

he painted her face with the same precision

he gave to a cut flower, when all he knew of abundance

was filling the prow: an oval of matte, magnolia light,

and, as shadow just starting along one edge,

the slender scorch of compromise the living carry.

Did he know the one as sorrow, the one

he held, gunshot-fallen, its

remarkable long tale . . . beautifully variagated
?

•

For the viewer, fate's in the numbers, legend says:

One magpie for sorrow, two for mirth,

three for a wedding, four for a birth . . .

•

And wedded in their way they were—Lewis, the bird—

their fragile union finalized
with a narrow ring

of yellowish black
just at the rim of the bird's dim eye.

•

September. Morning. A breeze

through the aspens, fine. (Five for silver, six for gold . . . )

Two centuries still, until language could cup,

•

in the binary digits of zero and one, all

it could name. And so he cupped the bird,

and framed in script its glossy frame:

•

the belly is of a beatifull white . . . the wings . . .

party coloured . . . changeable . . . sonetimes presenting as . . .

orange yellow to different exposures of ligt.

•

Time still, until sorrow's variegated wing

would bisect the land, would sever from the whole

each singular figure. Here was wonder,

•

chipped from the western sky, its legs and taloned toes,

black and imbricated, the shifting tint of its shape,

particolored, changeable. (Seven for a secret not to be told.)

•

The wings have nineteen feathers . . . it's usual food

is flesh . . . beautifull . . . yellow . . . a redish indigo blue . . .

at this season single as the halks.

•

September, the little rhyme fluttering above him,

dragging in from the far Atlantic its swift, domestic echo.

Did he wonder, then, why the story closed so suddenly?

•

(Eight for heaven, nine for hell, and ten

for the devil's own self.) Why abundance alone

could stop the heart's progression?

•

Morning. Nine's beak, eight's weightless wings.

Then ten, heartless with promise, sets down

on a dipping branch, the click of its digits—

•

black and imbricated—beginning

the cycle again: the one and then the nothing

from which the one sets forth.

Or lion. Too little marble left for certainty:

affixed to a bonelike armature, just a flank

and scored shoulder, and far down the missing,

crouching shape, a single, splay-toed paw.

The companion, or mate, is better formed

and offers a template to trace a bit, image to absence

to memory, until the lioness fills.

•

The exhibit is
Fragments and Dislocations:

Sight and Sightlessness
. Across the room

in Renaissance, the painter, retinas tattered

as a saint's hem, might have filled the lioness

differently: absence first, then memory,

and then the lines around his own vision, its crags

•

and wilderness. His century failed him,

a placard says. Just eyelid balms

and powdered rhubarb. What retina remained

must have caught the subject's chosen states—penitence

and ecstasy—nearsightedly, which would explain

the perfect stones, less perfect trees. Or perhaps

his partial sightlessness was corneal, and thus

•

the painting's mood, front-lit through gauze.

In either case, what the painter knew—that his saint

and tiny crucifix would not adorn an altarpiece—

comes to us more slowly. Wood grains,

punch patterns, and the small keyhole

beneath a varnished leaf, suggest a sacristy cupboard,

•

not worship's place, but preservation's.

Chosen states,
the placard said.

Vacancy and memory. Ecstasy and penitence.

And then,
His partial vision of the whole

produced a partial masterpiece
:

a saint—Jerome—and grizzled robe, flawless

in its dust. The rest is incomplete, but zero-mass

•

radiography, its lights and darks reversed,

reveals a shape beneath the scene:

Jerome as just two simple lines, white arc

across white axis—before they both were white-

washed over, and the saint began,

and umber brought the lion to him.

• MICHAEL FARADAY

I will never contain the whole of it, he said,

the mirror too small for the long-necked lamp

floating swanlike near the angle of incidence.

Never, he said, stepping back from the lectern

•

and long-necked lamp, the mirror he held too small

for the swan. To reflect the object entirely,

he said, stepping back to the lectern,

the glass must be half the source's height.

•

To reflect the object entirely—the lamp,

or a swan, or my figure before you—

the glass must be half the source's height.

Unlike thought, which easily triples the whole.

•

My figure before you, the lamp's swan,

reflects my object entirely; that is, unlike

thought, which easily triples—or transforms—the whole,

the mirror is bound by harmony.

•

Entirely. Unlike the object reflected.

Finally, when you back away from the glass, your image—

the mirror is bound by harmony—

always doubles the distance between you.

•

As it finally backs away through the glass,

light doubling its loss through angles of reflection,

your image doubles the distance between you—always

twice as far from the source as you are before it:

•

Like a thought doubly lost through an act of reflection

floating swanlike past its angle of incidence,

twice as far from its mate as a lamp from a mirror

that will never contain the whole of it.

In Roget's first edition, slimmer by half

than this last, the whole is closer to folly,

the part to wisdom, the start to the close,

•

although, short or long, the journey's the same—

begin with
Existence
and end in the cloisters—

and, early or late,
Space
,
Matter
,

Sensation
,
Volition
, like navigable stars,

direct us, expansion by expansion.

•

Sunlight this morning. April. And twice,

when a sudden breeze crossed over my desk,

the 19th century's yellowed pages lifted like wings,

the later version flapping behind, a tissue-thin flurry

of words spinning into their antonyms.

•

Then everything settled

back into neighboring columns:
birth

and
cessation
,
advent
and
flight
,
source

•

and
consequence
. In a work of this nature,

Roget wrote—the cocoon of language forever

swelling—
Perfection
exists as far

from
Attainment
as
deity
from
galaxy
.

But not far at all from
Imperfection
.

•

Or
Blemish
. Or
Bane
. List beside list,

like rain-filled furrows they shape each other—

and together hatch, just between
blight

and
flawlessness
, a rust-tipped moth

that sips from each continually.

• GEORG STELLER, THE AMERICAN EXPEDITION, 1742

From the Harbor of Apostles Peter and Paul,

we sailed in their namesakes,
St. Peter

with its groats and falconets,
St. Paul

with its groats and falconets,

then ship and ship in a topgallant wind

bearing east-southeast together, identical to the distant eye

as glimmer and reflection.

••••••••••••

When we shall wish to speak to you, Captain—and Captain—

to warn you or guide you or follow or precede you,

we shall, through pennants, jacks, drums, bells,

lanterns, guns, and speaking horns,

deliver a language precise as script,

through which may God preserve us.

••••••••••••

Light rain. Open sea.

•

I think of the rhumb we have set for ourselves

as ice upon a pin tip: point and course

interchangeable.

Now and then,

from the pitch pot, the faintest scent of pine.

•

St. Paul
in the east all morning.

••••••••••••

If we should desire that you take the lead . . .

If you should desire to lower the yards . . .

If it is desired to anchor in fog . . .

If we should separate—

from which misfortune may God preserve us . . .

If after three days . . .

If from the flagstaff a blue flag . . .

If in sailing close-hauled or free . . .

••••••••••••

What good is structure against a world

already structured by chaos? What good,

pattern, sequence, formation, formality?

We lost the
St. Paul
on the sixteenth day,

though we sensed thereafter a parallel presence.

•

Four months. Clewed, hove to.

Then islands and islands at the New World's rim.

What else can I tell you?

Shipwreck. Rocks on the boot soles. Down the beach,

•

one arctic fox, fearless, barked.

••••••••••••

Presence? Parallel. A thereafter sensed. We, though . . .

••••••••••••

Then more, barking, white in their winter fur,

slinking in toward our fires like ground fog.

They had no history with us, and hence

no fear of us, we with so little but history.

•

We shot them. They came. We shot. They came.

When winter blew through our crude huts,

we caulked the sticks with their bodies.

When blizzards drove us deep in their caves,

•

they climbed into crevices over our heads, shifting

all night like a wind-rippled canopy—

or wide-winged, otherworldly bird

that would not fly from us.

••••••••••••

When we shall lay to . . . you shall lay to . . .

When we after drifting . . . you after drifting . . .

When we shall lower . . . you shall lower . . .

••••••••••••

To lay, drifting lower. After drifting

to rise . . . As, God willing, they do, sounding their way

down these shallow coasts, echo by echo.

•

Scurvy and winter lessened us, already

halved on the sixteenth day—

not from ourselves, exactly, or from others,

but from the outcome of self and other,

the crafted, patterned offerings

that, over water, met us halfway.

•

What else can I tell you, there in your morning

or nightfall, knowing already

of voyages, violence, hardship, grace? What else

can I write, alive and whole and world-full,

yet fractured as these notes to you?

•

From the body of our ship, collapsed on the shore,

we built a ship, from the shattered shape

a smaller shape, a single-masted oval cask

which, over time, delivered us.

••••••••••••

Two lanterns, that we might receive you . . .

Six guns, that we might avoid you . . .

One flag—blue—that we might know you

after long absence . . .

••••••••••••

They seem nothing but steam now, the foxes.

The sudden, unbidden breath over glass

that blinds us shapelessly.

•

What most endures with me—

a multivoiced jay—will, you say,

carry what most remains of me. My name

and the bird stitched back to back, balanced

•

as reflection.
S-t-e-l-l-e-r-'-s j-a-y—

four strokes plus a star mark reaching upward,

five strokes in answer close to the ground,

one stroke, then one

fathoming, and the whole,

aloft on the thermals,

blue as the pennants that reveal from the crosstrees

we are each the lost companion.