Roget's Illusion by Linda Bierds

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    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.”
    â€œAccountancy: 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).

PART ONE

Roget’s Illusion: One
    â€¢ 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.
    â€¢
    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
    â€¢
    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.
    â€¢
    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 . . .

Simulacra
    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