Towards the Sound of a Heron Stepping on Ice

February mist, morning thaw just begun, & the heron that is the same

color of slate as the pond on which she moves

                                                                           today is nowhere in sight.

Two days ago, my wife & I watched her hunting near the drainage pipe

& heard at first nothing at each supple step. Then, just as her foot touched,

a muffled creak of something

                                               giving way, her body’s weight pressing

at ice. We lost track of how long this lasted: patternless, a few steps

these tentative steps, lean in, wait implausibly, then begin

moving again. What happened

~

                                                 took place weeks after

Isadora Duncan’s children drowned & isn’t much of a story at all.

This was after the driver turned the stalled car’s crank & the vehicle

lurched & tumbled down the embankment, broke the river’s surface,

& was gone. Somewhere

on a beach on Corfu, Duncan imagines

the Seine’s ribboned gray—its surge

                                                          & gradual calm—& pictures

hooks & dragging lines, an anchor snagged on a sun-glazed wheel.

Then, although she’s promised there will be nothing more,

willed: for a moment, almost, mending, evanescence, her body

both forgotten & salve to itself, & then fastened to a way of saying

that somehow seems to suffice. For years,

~

a man born in a stubble field

is satisfied documenting his walks. It is, he claims, our flawless art,

just as it’s perfect

                             how dust freckles each lemon tree blossom, or how

his horses stir in their decrepit stalls, watching rain pool in the dark palm

of a shovel & in the earth

                                         between their hooves. These are moments

the man considers, too, as he drifts through the streets & hills, taking

endless pictures of himself doing ordinary things, stark naked in each one.

Catching his breath at a barbwire fence, waiting for a passing mule.

Striding past a silo, scattering ravens. Arms outstretched, leaping from a rock.

Sipping walnut brandy in the shade.

A friend once tried to explain this to me,

defining it in terms of dailiness, ritual, the precarious

framework of the mundane. Think of Duchamp’s urinal, I was told.

Or Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning,

a piece in which absence, fixed

in a gold-leaf frame, becomes

                                               an end in itself. In which absence takes

the form of a yellow sheet clumped with remnants of ink & crayon. It’s not

the same, is it, as that story of Pollock, most likely far from true?

How he once bought a Picasso in order to erase it, to learn

how the line might work,

                                        the way the body’s dialect finds voice.

Lead on cream paper, c. 1908. Four Studies of the Human Hand.

Then his task filled hours—each fingertip, knuckle,

~

                                                                                wrist. In a photo

taken somewhere in Russia, a crowd lunges towards a train window,

eager for the papers offered by a boy, hardly caring they’re mostly lies.

But now here is the reason we look at it, why it was preserved:

in the window next to this boy someone has been painted out.

Airbrushing, cropping, faces

ink-smudged or excised with a razor—

it was all common, we know. Except here the work is so poorly done

it looks deliberate—how the black of the window barely blends

with the space where his body should be

& all of his contours

are clear. At his torso, the oval construct of his head, each brushstroke

is so thick & obvious, patterned

                                                   in thumbprint whorls, it resembles

proportion lines from some How to Draw book. Symmetries, ratios,

augmented angles, methods to ensure

                                                               each of the parts is in harmony

with the whole. It’s as if whoever removed him from this scene

was only beginning to understand just how the body works—

its axis, his shoulder’s traversing lines, that single mark

from scalp to ribs.

                             Polyclitus knew the beautiful comes about

little by little, through many numbers, & perhaps with our rules

for rendering ourselves

                                      mimesis is nothing but math. Perhaps, too,

this work was botched in order that we might notice, might begin

to guess. That this man who stared down half asleep from the train

was the same man who once seared his brother’s eyes with a rust-flecked awl

then walked from his home without a word. Who, one night, was made to kneel

in the woods when his throat was slit

~

beneath the pines. Done in one take,

forty seconds long, the first film ever made—Lunch Hour at the Lumière Factory—

shows only a crowd

                                walking into sunlight, hurrying into a blazing lane.

There’s a rush of wool dresses, hand placed into a pocket, a shrug,

& rattles along with the same effort of its name—cinématographe,

from the Greek, meaning writing the movement. They watch

soundless blacksmiths striking at steel,

the lift & curve of waves,

& then a passenger train that glides into a station & seems to them,

at least in one story, like artifice

~

                                                   for a single breath more. Muybridge,

I’ve read, invented moving pictures by making a horse circle a track.

First it galloped & broke each thread laced across its path,

which in turn tripped the camera shutters & told us how it moved—

how its body curved, lagged, compressed,

& how there were moments,

indiscernible, when not a hoof touched the earth.

                                                                               A few years after

he hunted down his wife’s lover playing cribbage at a Calistoga mine

& shot him point-blank in the chest, Muybridge made

naked dancers & gymnasts move against a grid of white lines.

Here is A Man Walking

                                   and Turning. A Man Heaving a Boulder.

Carrying a Rifle. Digging with a Spade. A Woman Drying Her Feet. Listen:

there’s no better time to finish one story I began before. It’s about the artist

who roamed the village hills & I’m not even sure it’s true: when war came,

the man arranged to end his walks

& put his camera away. Instead, he began

to choose. He chose which of the dead he would allow to be buried,

which rottweiler, woman, which ear. To make

                                                                        some move barefoot

towards an idling truck, then bedsprings, truncheons, stones. But listen:

after sitting on the floor. This time, though, she takes a few steps, kneels

at a chair, pauses,

                              then rises again. She has either a look of solemnity

or a half-smile latched to her face—because she knows

what she is about to do.

                                        By the fifth frame we can see it, almost

in entirety, & she touches it with her knuckle. This is A Woman Kneeling

at a Chair, & somewhere within or near the eighth frame—

since this is all she intends—gesture & desire

                                                                         coalesce. She lowers

her body, clasps her hands, in one motion bowing her head,

& even if this lasts for just a fractured second she seems

to be honestly in prayer. As if not kneeling at but to a chair. Adamant,

resolved. As if there were nothing else to kneel to. As if knowing

in a moment she will be finished & begin to rise

but for now it is still not yet.

(reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin)