Moir

EMERY GEORGE

MOIRE

Moire is the visual effect created

when one closely striated or hatched

pattern: a car grill, a fence, a surface of silk,

coincides with another. Movement

results, as when, given that both surfaces

are physically at a perfect standstill,

you move your head or entire upper torso.

The substance is here; in circles, the lines elude you.

It is not the effect you obtain when you take a clean

porcelain cup in a brightly lit room,

and, holding the cup under the light, you rotate it,

and you see delicate paraboloid

figures of light. Pure, light-white, they come at you, vanish,

depending on which way you tilt the cup.

Magical curves you can draw with pencil and ruler.

A mood iridescent and hyperbolic is Moiré.

What is not Moiré is patterns of light-white clouds

ona still, clear day, when, high up and looking

down on them, you try hard not to descry a face,

for to see faces when your own face looks back on you,

mirrored, serious, out of the small round window

near your seat, would make too much a counterpoint

of shapes. There, one had hoped to find an expressive

landscape of light: grid lines, brown and green land,

land and light, far from car grills and screens, but not far

from the source of that light which does still imprint

its intelligence on a curved interior space.

Form is its clarity, the whiteness in a cup, of a face,

knowing the light curve is its model, sculpting a living form.