Roget's Illusion (5 page)

In the prison of an unnamed century,

on paper coarse as sackcloth,

someone has written
No reason exists

and
the innocency of my actings

in midst of the late revolutions.

Then stopped—and circled two perfect artifacts,

caught years before in the damp pulp:

in the margin beside his curving
s
,

a single fly wing, dried to a gauze,

and far down the page, an arc of amber beard hair.

And as he writes for leniency, for his place

within the fabric of place,
the stars

above this terraqueous globe
and
the hazel wheat
,

he wishes the wing had followed the hair,

as transcendence follows the life well lived.

He wishes the order reversed—

that, first, lit by the hair's prophetic glint,

he might open his story—
Born of worthy parents
—

then weave his history forward, as the paper itself

wove history forward: flax to fabric to shirt

(pockets emptied, buttons snipped) to boiler to pulp

to lifted chin. He knows the power

of augury, of the signs in a
perfect path
.

He knows, were the wing pinned

near the page's end, he might close

with the grand intangibles, the diaphanous
strivings

of citizenship
—freedom, peace,

benevolence—and earn,

by his words, his flight.

Late day,

on the wind, two bells ringing in tandem,

sound and echo indistinguishable. No help

at all, the artifacts. Or augury. What good

is transcendence
before
the body, the natural,

upward arc reversed? As useless now

to elevate his humanness as to watch

the cobbled page withdraw, regain its rags,

its sacking, rope, its bits of salted fishing net.

If only time had stalled the fly—

and wing and hair were closer—his words

might ride them seamlessly, as sound

rides the ringing bells—
globe
and
glint
and
citizenship

indistinguishable on the wind.

If only weight

were valued more than weightlessness.

But pulp has fastened each to its place

and he has encircled them.

• PASTEUR AT NAPOLEON'S PALACE

B. mori: an inconspicuous moth, stout, weak-winged . . .

larvae hairless, hook-tailed . . . second thoracic ring

humped . . . and from the spinnerets, three thousand feet

of silk thread.
Here Pasteur quickened, the book's words

stepping down to his favorite word, enthusiasm—

the god within—which, in its bald, Bombyxian way,

even the moth might feel as
Rhythmically turning

in figure eights three hundred thousand times,

the ash-gray larval head casts its looped cocoon.

•

It was a time of cheap bread and parties,

grand public works and conspiracies. He quickened,

looked out at the palace trees, enthusiasm for the words—

and works—rising within him: the tireless heads

that spat the silk or cinched the empiry. He felt it,

there on the palace balcony, the god within,

the god who loped through the huntsmen's hounds

or gasped in the Empress's throat

as she bent to his microscope's eyepiece

and saw within not the god but the world,

its spores and languid flagellates.

•

Benign, but related to the injurious lackeys.

Mulberry-feeding . . . reproduction continuous

in the warmer reaches.
Pasteur nodded. It was a time

of injurious lackeys. Across the land, cocoons collapsed

and shriveled larvae peppered the lip-cast industry.

He nodded, enthusiasm for the moths, the cause, the cure,

tapped like a pulse beneath his pulse, rose in that dusk

as it always rose, season to season, past germs and bacilli

and parasites, even as he understood that the anti-life

infection shaped, the unmaking

that it patterned, was every inch as intricate

as the silk that drooped from an Empress's throat.

•

Now the moon appeared, pale in the palace trees.

He closed his book. In the courtyard below his balcony,

torch-bearing huntsmen were forming a large ring, one hunter

at the center, like a moon in a circle of stars. And again

it rose, enthusiasm for the ring, the hunter

now lifting skyward the dark, ceremonial flank of a stag.

Pasteur felt it again tapping as into the ring

the hunt hounds crept, then stopped, crept, stopped, crept,

stopped: enthusiasm for the ring, the hounds, the man within

who three times stopped them with a word.

Enthusiasm for the word, even when his counterword—

so close in sound, just an octave higher—

released them to the meat.

He placed a small mirror between his study windows. . . .

Through reflection, he could watch me approaching,

down the curved lane from gate to door, as I,

looking back, imagine him rising from his wide chair,

•

and a bit of the hearth and foot cushion.

Whenever weather mottled the mirror, Comfort—

then Lettington—polished it, clipping back the foliage

•

to a living frame that held us equally. And then

I was in, walking behind him down the wide hall

and across the back veranda, then out

•

toward his sandwalk copse. The mirror bent down

from the outer wall much as the mirror at Saint Bartholomew's

bends down from the organist's loft. And I told him this,

•

as we moved past the phlox and portulacas

and the ghostly rattle of the well's flywheel circled

behind us like locusts. From my pew in the empty church,

•

I knew that the mirror carried signals

up from choirmaster to loft—and didn't reflect

the organist's fingers down to the congregation, although

•

I imagined both, their seamless display cast down to me

through a slender cone of dust. Descent with modification—

but that is his phrase, not mine. And this

•

is his making: a long and narrow oval

shading a meadow's outer rim: a copse of hazel,

dogwood, hornbeam, birch, their leaves, as we walk

•

through the seasons, first a rasp then a rattle.

History is closer now, I say. And did he know that crows,

perched in the northern regions, gather

•

a little arc of ice on—what is it called? Just under

the throat? Gorget, he says. Yes, on the puffed gorget.

The ice looks like a queen's ruff. Or half-ruff,

•

nothing at the back, of course. In the hazel

just over our heads, the bird waits for a moment, regal

in its ruff of ice: a dark shape

•

we fashion together, gorget, black eye in a membrane

of lid. And although we know the ruff ends

where breath stops, we finish the circle anyway.

• VIRGINIA WOOLF, 1940

Up through the war they stream, the blunt bombers,

rushing toward her unbidden between tea and dinner—

but no, the
moths
rushed toward her unbidden,

and years before, lovely, alit by the same luminous windows

•

she papered just this morning. After her walk on the marsh.

When guns rumbled on the Channel ports. But no,

it was thunder that rumbled, although under the storm

the guns of Flanders softly popped.

•

How the war obsesses. And she cannot form letters,

or forms them as echoes, words drawn back

through the years, their figures confused. No, fused—

for hadn't the Messerschmitt, crashed on Caburn's summit,

•

crowned the mountain like a blunt moth, wings extended?

There's petrol saved for suicide, Leonard said,

should Hitler win. And on the lilacs? Perfect

summer weather. So they go on. Panic, then bowls

•

on the green lawn. The buzz of propellers just overhead

and, at sunset, the glow of Botten's haystack.

Midway through her walk, when the air-raid siren bleated,

she looked to the haystack for refuge—a filigree

•

of camouflage—but no, the sky stayed clear

and she hurried on. Once, Duncan said, near Charleston,

high in the cloudless sky, he watched a bomber crumble—

instantly—just a flash and almost silent click.

•

Sunset. A wash of poppies in the corn. And do moths

circle the haystack's almost light, as bombers circle

the almost seen? One weighted, one weightless,

one poisoned, one benign, bracketing the hour?

•

She cannot form letters. Looks out

through the marsh. Had she entered the sweet hay,

rewoven its skein above her, dropped back

and back through the years, until she was nothing

•

but cells in a larval slick, would the soul reopen,

borderless? But no—always—the outer bracket

closes. High in the cloudless sky, Duncan said,

silver pencil, puff of smoke.

What was the sound, a rasp?

No, not a rasp.
A rattle, then?
No, not that.

And twice it passed over you?
I sat

at the waist-gunner window. Night—

and the wingtip's flashing light

bit through slanted snow: green, green.

Then we struck the mountain.
And of eight,

five were thrown free and survived?

I was cast into deep snow

and plane-shaped debris slipped over me.

Its sound a scraping?
No,

not a scraping. It slipped down the canyon wall

and I followed its snow-trough, then

guided the others to me

with blasts from my Mae West whistle.

Yours was a rescue mission, far from war?

I was alone and just overhead in the darkness

snow geese and trumpeter swans passed.

And the green light flashed?

I could hear their bodies working—
And you sat

at the waist?
—ligament, ligature, the labor

of leaving.
In unison, then? A thrum?
No,

each sound in its slender chamber.
And you

whistled them down to you?
Yes.

One August night, ten thousand.

Four thousand now, in this long, September dusk.

Some repeaters, staying over.

•

No first-growth stumps in sight—

no forests at all on this stretch of flyway—

and so they roost in a school's brick chimney,

ten thousand then, four thousand now,

•

turning in wide, counterclockwise gyres

above the chimney's rusted clockface, turning

their four-inch, half-ounce shapes, three heartbeats

per wingbeat, three heartbeats per clipped syllable

of each high-pitched cry, some repeaters,

•

staying over. Just to the west,

the sunset that stains their bellies

to the dusty gold of mine canaries

•

slips over the gray Pacific, which to the east, under

Kentucky and Illinois, the root-tips of fossil forests

reach down through the roofs of coal-mine shafts.

Tropical then, the trees, three hundred million years ago,

•

rain-filled, before the planet quickly warmed

and the magma shifted and the world's first birds

cast their first neuronic blips

and the world's first flocks answered in unison.

What? the miners asked, brushed on the nape

•

by a weightlessness three hundred million years

whittled. Only the roots of absence, tepid

across the skin. And tangible in that darkness

•

as the sudden blip that any moment now

will draw this flock, like airborne ash, backward

through the chimney. The cell-phone camera eyes,

like miners' headlamps, tip up in unison

•

toward a micro-ounce of source too swift

for mystery. Wing dip? Cell click? Could the answer

be corporeal? Attention to the matter?

Their eyes are bigger than their beaks. Their sleep—

no opposable toes—is vertical. Just to the west,

•

a line of contrail draws us—

and down they drop, wings tucked, past

the chipped mortar and carbon dust, past the open flue,

the first birds overlapped by the next, and those

•

by the next, and next, climbing the chimney's shadow shape

in four-inch repetitions. Ten thousand then,

four thousand now, upright on the bricks.

• AFTER PAINTINGS BY WALTER SICKERT

War. Desire. In painting one, the last hours

brighten the wind-blown gas lamps, which light in turn

a wooden stage and beach chairs, a slouched pierrot

alert to an absent audience. In painting two

•

no Brighton at all, no gas lamps' down-turned light

wind-blown to gull wings. Just costumed lovers—two—

alert to an absent audience. In painting two, embracing,

the shadowed figures fuse, he in white—his wizard's cap

•

and gull-wing sleeves—loving the role, accustomed to

the secrecy, she in black, back toward us, a darkened

figure fused to white, shadowed by a wizard's cap.

The time in painting one is war. Behind the knock-down stage

•

the sea creeps toward us, sheened in black, a darkened

hush climbing a darkened pier. Across the Channel, the guns

of Flanders—the time in painting one is war, the stage

is European, a knock-down shape shattered and regathered—

•

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.