Roget's Illusion (3 page)

Waves or Moths or whatever it is to be called.

•
VIRGINIA WOOLF

If it is to be The Waves, then

the moon, perhaps, weighting a sextant's upper shelf,

with the sea a shelf below some traveler's feet.

Planets, time, position line, position line—

and the place is fixed. Invisibly.

•

If it is to be The Moths, then

something about their flight. April, perhaps.

In a window, the night-blooming horn

of a gramophone. And over the fields,

moths flying, holding their brief shapes

in constant angle to a planet's light.

•

If it is to be The Waves—the sextant and salt—

then nothing to see at first but stars

and indices. Not the wake's pale seam.

Not a fin or foremast. Not even

the daylit band of the past,

just under the earth's horizon.

•

Not yet, at least. No story. (A lamp, perhaps,

a flowerpot.) No past with its child

stopped by a lake in her stiff shoes, toeing

the placid water. Arm's length before her,

in an arc, dollops of bread bob—and beyond

the bread, in a second arc, a dozen,

hand-sized turtles, treading in place.

•

They cannot eat, the moths. (A little nectar,

a little sap.) Mandibles gone. Just a slender,

tubal tongue wound like a watch spring

in their hollow throats. And, afraid, the turtles

will not eat, the shadow of the backlit child

rippling toward them as, one by one,

new dollops of bread drop.

•

If it is to be The Waves, then

cycles on cycles. Eternity. Plurality. (Even the rogue

absorbed.) If it is to be The Moths, then

singleness and brevity. Great brevity—although,

in the leaves behind the child, they are just

beginning to stir, the day's late light

•

caught in the orbs of the early lamps.

And what is that feeling, shaking its wings

within her? Late day, the leaves and bread

and urgency, all the curious curved shapes

treading in place. If she took a step backward,

would they, in an arc, draw nearer, as a ring

might follow its planet? What then

would she make of the world?

• MICHAEL FARADAY

Watched, as a child, the clockmaker, the glint

of his iris deep in the eyepiece, like mica in a well.

•

Watched iron filings bristle a magnet.

•

In his father's shop, watched an axle's tip sag over an anvil.

•

Loved the Fens.

•

Loved Virgil's words on young vines, their trellis

of elms in the nursery field.

•

Considered life as a clockmaker.

•

Considered life as a blacksmith.

•

Loved, on his mother's table, the candle-powered carousel,

how the colts floated up on their tiny fobs as the heat rose.

•

Wrote with pencil in a leather-bound notebook:

“Soap bubbles.” “Balloon.”

•

Wrote: “Refer to the last lecture.”

•

Wrote: “Respiration and its analogy

to the burning of a candle.”

•

Considered Virgil's vines, transplanted.

•

Considered the empty elms, each knife-notched

to show where the vines once faced.

•

Inducted electrical currents. (Seven halfpence, seven

rounds of zinc, six paper discs moistened by salted water.)

•

Refuted, through science, séance table-turning.

•

Saw, through Virgil, notched elms as the map

for a parallel planting.

•

Understood, as a child, the hiss of a candle's wick.

•

Understood the clockmaker's words:
verge
,
escapement
.

•

Loved electromagnetism, “The constant circling of a wire

round a magnet and a magnet round a wire.”

•

Loved the lack of escapement there, each

neither dragging the other nor leaving it behind.

•

Saw, through Virgil, notched elms as the tracks

of a cogged wheel.

•

Saw, through time, “The idea of them as they dwell in matter.”

•

Wrote in a blue-green notebook: “Carbon.” “Cathode.”

“
Cannot
.” “Cannot.” “However exalted they may be.”

•

Wrote: “We shall today.” “For a little while.”

•

Wrote: “Correlation of the physical forces.”

• AFTER THE PAINTING BY PIETRO LONGHI, C. 1751

To the tumbler settling on the sawdust street,

with its flames and hoops and carnival swords

•

swirling up like an alchemist's galaxy, this quiet scene,

glimpsed through a stable's open doors, seems at first

•

a pond—wall-locked, opaque, lit from above

by the upreaching arc of a white swan.

•

Then his eyes adjust and the pond is a dampened

stable floor, one ruffle of black rhinoceros. And who

•

would step forth to restrain him,

if he slipped on his hands and tumbler's knees

•

in through that black expanse? Or rolled

in a patchwork somersault

•

like a moon in its blue orbit, while

the swan slowly shifted from beak and wing

•

to a gaggle of white-masked spectators, mute in the muted

light? Who would object if he nestled beside

•

that nobility, that count, that willowy, pale contessa

whose throat and white breast

•

first gave to his eyes a swan's neck? From her perch

near a waist-high wall, she is watching

•

a black-cloaked domino, the dip of his tricornered hat

as he bends to the still rhinoceros,

•

the wall a border he leans across. And who

would not quicken, as the tumbler does

•

in his froth of sawdust and shadow, when

the beast slowly raises its earthen mass,

•

its dusty, furrowed, thick-skinned snout, where

a flag of summer wheat dangles? Just over

•

its plated hull, just over its rheumy, upturned eyes,

the eyes of the domino hover, dim, plated

•

in silk, pale as hoops

afloat in some future's flat-lit sky.

•

Dominance? Challenge? A courtship display?

Who would not wonder what the animal sees

•

in the white-masked face of such

facelessness, as its toes slowly spread

•

on the dampened floor, and a shiver of wheat

rises and falls with its breathing?

This many times have I dined with the Factor ///////,

thus often with Stecher /, thus with my Lords //////.

(I am drawn to the fishes. And to citrons—sugared,

like frost over gem stones.)

•

In trade for my portraits, I have taken

a branch of white coral, a cedarwood rosary, an ounce

of good ultramarine. And a great fish scale

that gauzes the day through its intricate lens.

•

This many times have mummers amused me ////.

•

Fourteen stuivers, to date, for raisins. Two for a brush.

One for a buffalo horn. Twenty florins in all

for firewood, flax, one elk's hoof, one parrot cage.

In December, four florins—gold—for a little baboon

•

who nods like Erasmus when darkness descends.

There is solace, I find, in accountancy,

the prudent, resonant thrift of an evening's meal

preserved in a slant mark, like the solace I feel

•

with needle and ink, Time's cantering beast

furred for eternity by a burin's bite.

•

To Johann, one
Passion
. To the surgeon

and house servant, each, a
Life of Our Lady
.

To Konrad, in service of the Emperor's daughter,

one
Melancholy
, three
Mary
s, a
Eustace
, a
Nemesis
,

a
Jerome in His Cell
. (Arranged on a wall,

these gifts might mirror our human progression,

as the Great Procession of Our Lady's Assumption—/—

mirrored our ranks, butcher to saint.)

•

This many times has a fever consumed me /////.

I have dined again // with my Lords.

•

At the Feast of Our Lady's Assumption, just after

Craftsmen in the Great Procession, but before Prophets

and an armored Saint George, came a crowd of widows

garbed in white linen, accounting for losses amongst us.

Silent, in step, they seemed not shape but vacancy,

•

alit between mason and seamstress, foot soldier and clerk.

They seemed the space an etch mark frees,

the empty trough that shape awaits.

Grand day, carmine and boot-black and the swirling

world. And those stately widows

defining our borders? These times

did their passing enfold me ///////////////////////////////.

To the dedicated listener, two sounds prevailed that night:

from rafters above the Grand Canal, pigeon snores,

and from the murky water, the tap of gondolas,

like empty walnut shells, against the water steps.

A January Wednesday, 1894, and through those

parenthetic sounds, a figure, Constance Woolson—

novelist, great friend to Henry James—leapt

to her death.

She fell.

Depressed—
delirious, demented
—she died of—
influenza
—

loving him.
Of unrequited love for James? There is no

evidence
. Seven years before that night, mid-April

through late May, they shared a home in Bellosguardo.

A villa. Voluminous
. Then met in Geneva, secretly.

Secretly? Perhaps, although discretion ruled, not

impropriety.

No impropriety? Agreed, although

what ruled was vanity, his need for her devotion.

A spinster, deaf
—in just one ear—
and elderly
—a mere

three years his senior—
she was for him primarily a . . .

source—think Alice, Tita, Cornelia, May—

yes, a loyal friend, of course, but . . .

Knowing

her death was suicide, James “utterly collapsed.”

He could not know, although he suffered, yes.
And moved

into her empty rooms, into her empty beds, in Venice, then

in Oxford.
He sought her ghost—as you do now.

She took herself away—
There is no evidence
—

away from his possession,

he who so valued possession.

What is biography?
What did he mourn?
Analysis?

Appropriation?
She slipped away, as he has slipped

from you.
Anecdote and intuition?
Some weeks beyond

her death, by gondola, James ferried her dresses

to the wide lagoon and, one by one—
Reverence?

Devotion?—

lowered them into the water.

They floated back, and back, he said—
Hearsay?

Secondhand remembrance?
—like ghastly, black

balloons, empty and full simultaneously;

although, through salt, silt, and the turning years,

their tidal scrape against the weave—

Reciprocal immortality?
—there is no evidence.

We entered Venice by Casa degli Spiriti.

•
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON

Imagine a white horse, alone in a watery meadow.

Or, alone in a watery meadow, imagine

a white horse. The latter increases your need for me,

your relief in my company, as we walk together

down the story's thin lanes, circling the meadow

and lolling horse, and the gondoliers on the landing

bicker and smoke and shuffle their soft-backed cards.

We have, you as my character and I as your guide,

crossed from Venice on the wide lagoon—

rib-cage deep but for trenches the ships slip through—

and we look toward it now, as one by one

its spires sink through a white fog, that, like your need,

advances.

To keep me beside you, you speak

of da Vinci's menagerie and the grape skins

best suited for grappa. You would question my friendship

with Henry James—you had hoped, in fact,

for Henry James—but I have grown singular here,

essential to you as our gondoliers, although

they've turned silent, fog-erased, and beacon us closer

by nothing but pipesmoke and their cards' arrhythmic

purr. You would ask of his manner, his temperament,

the nature of our fidelity—two writers enamored

with fiction's grip—of my life in his presence,

of my life in his shadow,

but are grateful instead

to watch as I pock our trench with pilings

and we feel our way back through the pale lagoon,

column by column, much as the blind

might track the cairns on an ancient path.

You are frightened, I know, in those intervals

when our hands break free and we float

into nothingness. And, yes, I have kept this from you:

increasingly, as the page fills, I am the fabric

of nothingness. You would ask of his voice

and fashion, the nature of our fidelity,

but out from the white fog, here is Casa degli Spiriti,

where up you swing from the swaying boat

and that which remains absorbs me.