Roget's Illusion by Linda Bierds

Author:Linda Bierds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Girl in a Dove-Gray Dress

When their slim pirogue slipped over the trapper trails,

through salt marsh and tupelo swamps, out

through inlets and broken bayous, Joseph Mason,

Audubon’s border boy, who could paint the backdrops

but not the birds, the surround but not the subject,

•

cut blossoms from low-hanging branches, filling

the prow. At thirteen (although some said eighteen),

he knew the sea but not the inlets. From rumor

and warped maps, he knew the routes, past branches

and pilings thick with birds—more each day, more

•

than a single life could paint—he knew the routes

but not the journey, the mission but not the compromise:

The Birds of America abridged by abundance.

Large for his age, or small, what did he know

of compromise? Or of Audubon, slumped

•

in the stern, neck stretched down

toward his silent flute, like a great heron

bent forever down an elephant folio? What did he know

of the whole, lessened? How vision, on its path

from the mind to the world, dissipates? For him,

•

the oak on the shore was the oak on the page.

(But not the waterlogged banyan, its roots

limbs, its shape too reversed for the untrained eye.)

Dead just before forty, he had loved the flat pirogue,

the sleek, mottled, tapered skin that swept him

•

so weightlessly over the water. And graphite. Chalk.

How paper could hold what held the birds.

He had loved the ibis. And the belladonna—Its lift

like a dark cape! (Although what he loved was flight,

not word—and neither within his reach.) As Audubon rallied,

•

caught what he could, from crane to a speckle

of kinglet, Joseph braided their vine-filled atmospheres,

over then under, in the style of the woven, there

then not, in the style of the frame. Dead long before

forty, his life half absorbed by settings,

•

he was drawn at last by sitters: the dual exchange

of portraiture. Merchants. Matrons. Then his best,

a child in a dove-gray dress. And although

he rendered her backdrop badly—sewing box

and books stretched out of perspective—

•

he painted her face with the same precision

he gave to a cut flower, when all he knew of abundance

was filling the prow: an oval of matte, magnolia light,

and, as shadow just starting along one edge,

the slender scorch of compromise the living carry.

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