Vaucanson’s Duck

Monsieur Vaucanson, well-known for his automatic machines,

Has now come to this city to share with the Académie his plan.

Vaucanson’s duck –	with wire sprung neck,
with fragile hoops	declining;
unplumed, unflighted	by metallic fishbarb
of quill, of spine, rachis;	with panelled face
with plated eye	unsighted – sits still,
caught all up.	His brittle ankle
all caught up	in massive mechanism.
But soon, mesdames messieurs,	beneath
the lack of wings	each wheel on massy wheel
each steel cog tooth	– of face and pitch –
in bolted pig-iron ironframe,	will rachette up
and trip quick animation	in my automate,
sprung to lifelike.	With quack and flap,
its bill and beak,	its neb and tuck,
this plucked duck, with luck,	will up and up.
Motivation, emotion, move me.	Wind up
and up and into sinew	undulated strives.
Rhythmic lurches	unbind to wind out across
artful arch articulate.	Skeletal delicacy
moves, moved by	cranked energia.
And hefted to its shifts,	its punctual catches,
it pumps unfeathered wings,	pulled up
from webbed roots,	pneumatic plumps
chest puffed rebuffs	the big wind up and up.
And look, he’s up away	pneumatic
with the breeze	that winds its currents
round coil electric	animate.
Catches, catches the drift.	so swerves.
Lucky strokes,	beat, stroke,
tucks swerve round accident	and off,
out of frame,	unbuckled.
Vaucanson	can’t believe his duck,
and can’t account its	indirections;
it flits our expectations, it	defies prediction
in wilful predilection	perverse inclination
inclined, clined,	declines decline
branch from root	misled, sent sideways,
lull, jolt, shoot out	in semantic skid and pull,
spelling out canards in	weasel limbed whales.
He cuts across clouds	wetting his wings
on the rain drops they hold	and disrupting
a turbulent shower a cumulus.	His rupture
sends spray precipitous	cascades fall
as he writes his passage	diagonal
spinning in his scripted	wake.
Leaves Vaucanson	as a
startled	I.