Roget's Illusion by Linda Bierds Page A

wide-plank floor,
    before motion moved the figures, and torsion
    moved the motion—or steam, or sand,
    or candle flame—before magnets and taut springs
    nudged Gustav the Climbing Miller
    up his mill’s retaining wall (and gravity
    retrieved him), before image, like sound,
    stroked through an outreach of crests and troughs,
    and corresponding apertures
    caught patterns in the waves,
    caught, like eels beneath ancestral ponds,
    radiance in the energy,
    before lamposcope and zograscope,
    fantascope and panorama, before lanterns
    re-cast human hands, or a dye-drop
    of beetle first fluttered across
    a flicker book of papyrus leaves,
    someone sketched a creature along the contours
    of a cave, its stippled, monochromatic shape
    tracing the vaults and hollows,
    shivers of flank and shoulder
    already drawing absence nearer,
    as torchlight set the motion
    and shadow set the rest.

Notes from Prehistory
    â€¢ FONT-DE-GAUME CAVE PAINTINGS, LES EYZIES, FRANCE
    â€¢
    At Font-de-Gaume, the bison—eighty—
    bulge outward from their spindle legs
    and, quickened by candlelight, inch a half-step closer
    to flint-carved human hands and nineteen
    tectiforms. Across the cave, sketched
    to trace its contour lines, two dozen mammoths stir.
    And oxen—eight. Four capridae. One feline. (Two?)
    â€¢
    One bear. Not white, of course, although
    calcitic film, spawned across the centuries,
    has powdered it. Not violet-mouthed. Not
    iceberg-drawn, walking past the confluence
    of James and Hudson Bays, out and out, the ice
    too sparse, a thin, chivalric cape
    laid down on the endless water.
    â€¢
    Six varied signs. Or five. Cone. Canopy.
    Headless ampersand, swirled by lichen and manganese.
    Not nebular, those swirls, not polychrome,
    not cast in sheets across a bay, solar-flared,
    electric, green on muted red.
    One slender tri-forked cave, thin-branched as a sapling.
    One Rubicon. One terminal diverticulum.
    â€¢
    One bear, quickened in place, stopped
    on a lozenge of stone, a shrinking,
    fissure-crafted raft, above a canopy,
    beneath an ampersand. Here—and there—
    the stone, like ice, is water-polished
    or scoured by flint to a silver sheen, scratch marks
    zigging this way and that.
    â€¢
    Like magic, a candle’s light would shape
    the marks—erratic, pin-thin lines drawn up
    to concentric rings. Illusion, of course. Mirage.
    Not symmetry. Not grace.
    Just flint and form and a resin torch:
    to venerate the living world
    and keep the ghosts at bay.

Dürer near Fifty
    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.

Sketchbook
    â€¢ DR.