Free Roget's Illusion by Linda Bierds Page B

NICOLAAS TULP, 1635
    Because, each week, he has entered the body,
    its torso, freshly sanitized, its legs and arteries,
    the rose curve on the underchin executed so deftly
    by the hangman’s rope; because he has entered
    the forearm and cortex, the lobes and hidden
    vortices, deeper, then deeper, until what remains—
    shallow, undissected flesh—seems simple lines,
    their one dimension shadowless;
    and because he is tired and has been himself
    a subject,
    Tulp crumples his page, then tries again
    to sketch a caged orangutan. Placid, insouciant,
    the animal slips its shallow glances upward,
    downward, from the white-ruffed shape shaping it
    to the lap and simple page, as the first lines quicken
    and a ratted brow begins. There, a nostril,
    and there, a shadowing, a depth that plumps
    the cheek pouch, the finger’s wrinkled
    vortices. Slumped at their separate walls, neither
    meets the other’s eyes,
    although, equally, each
    completes the circling gaze—man to beast to page
    to man: two pelt-and-pipesmoke-scented curves,
    dimensionless, mammalian. Tick by tick
    the minutes pass, page by crumpled page.
    Beyond the door, caws and yelps and the clack
    of carriage wheels . . . and still they sit,
    Tulp, the ape, content to see the shapes
    they’ve known—or felt, or sensed, or turned within—
    sloughed in husks across the straw.

Fragments from Venice:
Albrecht Dürer
    You write for news and Venetian vellum.
    â€¢
    I answer: From the sea today a mystery:
    proportion’s carapaced nightmare: lobster.
    â€¢
    You write for burnt glass.
    â€¢
    I answer: When tides cross San Marco’s cobbles,
    bare-shouldered women, bare-shouldered girls,
    walk planks to the dark cathedral.
    â€¢
    Herr Willibald, my French mantle greets you!
    My plumes and misgivings greet you!
    Blue-black near the boiling vat, my carapaced neighbor
    greets you! (Since dusk, his thin-stalked eyes, like sunflowers,
    have tracked my orbiting candle.)
    â€¢
    You write that my altarpiece
    cups in its wings our destinies.
    â€¢
    I answer: In one-point perspective, all lines converge
    in a dot of sun far out on the earth’s horizon.
    â€¢
    I answer: Nightfall makes centaurs of the gondoliers.
    â€¢
    I answer: Afloat through the inns, a second perspective
    transposes the reign of earth and sun, placing
us
    at the vanishing point.
    â€¢
    You write that stubble on the winter fields
    supports, through frost, a second field.
    â€¢
    I answer: When tides withdraw there are birthmarks
    on the cobbles. And on the girls’ satin slippers
    age-rings of silt.
    â€¢
    You have seen, secondhand, the centaurs.
    â€¢
    I have seen the lobster redden,
    then rise like a sun through the boiling water.
    â€¢
    Immortality’s sign? you ask me. That slow-gaited sea change?
    That languorous rising?
    â€¢
    I have also seen a comet cross the sky.

From the Sea of Tranquillity
    Item: After the hopping and gathering,
    in that flat, crepuscular light, Armstrong
    stroked to the moon’s crisp dust, it is said,
    Albrecht Dürer’s initials, first the A’s wide table,
    then beneath it, the slumped, dependable D,
    the image sinking slowly through that waterless sea,
    named less for tides than resemblances.
    â€¢
    Item: In the year 1471, in the sixth hour
    of Saint Prudentia’s Day, Albrecht Dürer was born,
    the moon afloat in Gemini’s house, and far to the east
    Leo rising; an alliance that promised, with travel
    and wealth, a slender physique—so slender, in fact,
    Dürer slipped from it daily, as, gripped by concentration,
    someone else’s Albrecht drew a stylus down the grain.
    â€¢
    Item: Kicked up through the moon’s pale dust, a boot
    creates not a scattering but a wave, particles joined
    in a singular motion, faithful to the shape
    of displacement. Such is the loss of atmosphere,
    although aura remains, and time. Think of two men,
    each at his milky page, thirst and the