Roget's Illusion (6 page)

I am imagining how it would be if we could infuse souls.

•
VIRGINIA WOOLF

I.

Then moonlight burned through the low fog

and back he came, the gondolier, first

head and torso bent over the long oar, then

black shoes, soft on the stern's worn track.

And Wagner, his back to the prow, saw it all

as a slow unveiling, the figure moving

his huge sweep and, behind him, the spires

and funnel-shaped chimneys, then the marbled walls

and porticoes, then at last, all along the canal,

the black-cast, algae-slick stairs, stepping

down through the lapping water. And then,

Wagner wrote, sound drew what moonlight had drawn:

From the gondolier a wail began, not unlike the cry

of an animal, and slowly strengthened and formed itself

from long-drawn “Oh!” to the simple notes “Venezia.”

And the sound, Wagner wrote, revealed the place,

and the place the past, and the past the echo

that, like the watery sweep of an oar, carried him

backward into the future and became, in turn,

the long-drawn wail of the shepherd's horn

at the launch of
Tristan
's third act.

II.

A meadow, with sheep.

Lifting the gramophone's ebony arm,

Leonard said how the horn, the shepherd's horn,

once again brought back his childhood.

And the painting, high on the dining room wall,

a meadow, with sheep. And although Wagner's opera

rejects the daylit world, its false revelations, still,

Leonard said, the horn recalls that daylit scene,

widening as the note holds—how, here and there,

paint buckled like sealing wax and textured

the sheep. Then the real sunlight, how it brought

from the wooden floor a dozen amber currents,

and, from the carpet where he sat, a woolen garden.

III.

Blank. The land today was a canvas,

blank. No shepherd, no sheep. Just frost.

Burning white,
Virginia said.
Burning blue.

Then the elms, red. And what was that phrase

she forgot to remember?
Look your last

on all things lovely.
The war brings a sharp,

immediate sorrow.
Tavistock Square is no more.

It swells, then fades, as urgent sorrow must.

Then through a shallow wash of sunlight,

high on a slender elm, some deeper, cosmic sadness

opens its blunt wings. Then it too . . . somehow . . . lifts.

Red, purple, dove blue grey. I did not mean

to describe, once more,
she said,
the downs in snow.

But it came.

IV.

His childhood garden seemed touched by snow,

although it was August, each long-abandoned brittle stalk

chafed to dust. No sound as he stood there, Leonard said,

no wind. He was five.
The grimy ivy drooped

on the grimy walls.
And across the walls,

from leaf to leaf, were dozens and dozens

of spiderwebs, each pocked by a bead of spider.

And it came to him then for the first time,

that cosmic sorrow she mentioned—when

all of the windows are dark down the street,

and the dust is unmoving,

and desire fails
.

V.

To transcend desire, Tristan said, transcend

the world. Then Wagner placed him in a castle garden,

under a lime tree, downstage from a castle gate,

and said to him,
Now you are home,

amidst your meadows and delights, in the light

of the old sun.
And Tristan answered,

Is there any anguish

which it does not revive in its beams?

VI.

Then it too . . . somehow . . . lifts.

VII.

Why try again to make the familiar catalogue?

The frost, the elms, the colors, red, blue, dove grey?

She had written, Virginia said,
Last night

a great heavy plunge of bomb under the window—

and then, directly thereafter, of the elm tree's leaves

against the sky, of the cows feeding, of the pear tree

swagged with pears. Beauty. Pity.
Why try again

to make the familiar catalogue,

from which something always escapes?

VIII.

From which something always escapes.

And shall they listen again to the opera's first notes,

their rise and fall, like long oars inching a ship

toward Cornwall? And did he remember their walk

years ago?—the line of straw they placed near the river

to measure its height. Fog, thick on the water.

A boatman's voice, far down the towpath.

Why try again?
Morning. Rooks in the trees.

How she had written,
The deer exactly match

the bracken.
And then they do not. How over the water

a horn sounded, then a deer escaped its camouflage

and fled up the steep embankment.

For better or worse, beauty or pity—did he remember?—

how that bounding shape broke free.