Eleanor Wilner Poems

for Vivian Schatz

Here, in our familiar streets, the day
is brisk with winter's business.
The reassuring rows of brick façades,
litter baskets overflowing
with the harvest of the streets
and, when the light turns, the people
move in unison, the cars miraculously
slide to a stop, no one is killed,
the streets, for some reason, do not
show the blood that is pouring
like a tide, on other shores.

Martinez, the last peasant left alive
in his village, refuses to run, hopes
that God, El Salvador,
will let him get the harvest in.
"Can a fish live out of water?" he says
for why he stays, and weeds
another row, ignoring the fins
of sharks that push up
through the furrows.

Here, it is said, we live
in the belly of the beast. Ahab sits
forever at the helm, his skin
white wax, an effigy. The whale carries
him, lashed to its side by the ropes
from his own harpoon. His eyes
are dead. His ivory leg
juts from the flank of Leviathan
like a useless tooth.

One more time, the distant sail appears,
a cloud forms, an old icon for mercy
turned up in a dusty corner
of the sky, preparing rain
for the parched land, Rachel
weeping for her children. "Can a fish
live out of water?" he asks
and the rain answers, in Spanish,
manitas de plata
little hands of silver on his brow.
...

When he had suckled there, he began
to grow: first, he was an infant in her arms,
but soon, drinking and drinking at the sweet
milk she could not keep from filling her,
from pouring into his ravenous mouth,
and filling again, miraculous pitcher, mercy
feeding its own extinction . . . soon he was
huge, towering above her, the landscape,
his shadow stealing the color from the fields,
even the flowers going gray. And they came
like ants, one behind the next, to worship
him—huge as he was, and hungry; it was
his hunger they admired most of all.
So they brought him slaughtered beasts:
goats, oxen, bulls, and finally, their own
kin whose hunger was a kind of shame
to them, a shrinkage; even as his was
beautiful to them, magnified, magnificent.

The day came when they had nothing left
to offer him, having denuded themselves
of all in order to enlarge him, in whose
shadow they dreamed of light: and that
is when the thought began to move, small
at first, a whisper, then a buzz, and finally,
it broke out into words, so loud they thought
it must be prophecy: they would kill him,
and all they had lost in his name would return,
renewed and fresh with the dew of morning.
Hope fed their rage, sharpened their weapons.

And who is she, hooded figure, mourner now
at the fate of what she fed? And the slow rain,
which never ends, who is the father of that?
And who are we who speak, as if the world
were our diorama—its little figures moved
by hidden gears, precious in miniature, tin soldiers,
spears the size of pins, perfect replicas, history
under glass, dusty, old fashioned, a curiosity
that no one any longer wants to see,
excited as they are by the new giant, who feeds
on air, grows daily on radio waves, in cyberspace,
who sows darkness like a desert storm,
who blows like a wind through the Boardrooms,
who touches the hills, and they smoke.
...

The messenger runs, not carrying the news
of victory, or defeat; the messenger, unresting,
has always been running, the wind before and behind him,
across the turning back of earth, leaving
his tracks across the plains, his ropes
hanging from the ledges of mountains;
for centuries, millennia, he has been running
carrying whatever it is that cannot be
put down: it is rolled in a tube
made of hide, carefully, to keep it dry
as he runs, through storms and monsoons,
sometimes on foot, sometimes poling a boat
through a flooded mangrove swamp, or
setting stiff sails to cross from island to island
running before the wind. In some ages, peasants
have helped him—bringing him small cakes
of rice wrapped in the weeds of the sea and
new sandals woven of hemp for his torn
bleeding feet; sometimes in the heat of noon
they would offer a drink of rosewater, sometimes
a coat of fur against the winter snows;
and sometimes at night, he would rest
by a fire where voices wove with the music
of gut-strings, or with mountain pipes whose
sound was like wind through the bones
of creation—and he would be cheered
by the company of others, the firelit glow
of their faces like a bright raft afloat in the dark;
at times, rumors spread of his death, scholars
analyzed his obsession, dated his bones, his prayer bundle;
but at dawn, he always arose, in the mists,
in the blur of so many mornings, so many shoes
worn into scraps and discarded, so many
the cities that burned as he passed
them, so many the skulls abandoned
by armies, so many whose blood
stained the threads of their prayer rugs,
so many, so many, so many—
oh,
and that green, sunlit hill that kept
rising from the dark waters of flood, outlined bright
against the sky, the odds, the evidence—
and he, the messenger,
running through history, carries this small tube,
its durable hide—carries it, not like
a torch, no, nothing so blazing;
not like the brass lamp that summons
a genie, no magic wishes;
not like the candles that hope sets aflame
and a breath can extinguish ...

no.
He carried it like
what has no likeness,
what is curled up inside and
he swore he could feel it, though
perhaps he had dreamed it, still
at times, stopping under some tree
or other, when the night was warm,
so close the stars seemed to breathe in
the branches, he would lie quiet,
then it would seem
that whatever it was in there
would pulse softly with light, a code
only the heart could break
(but of course he couldn't say
for he was only the messenger)—
and at sunrise, wearily, he would rise
to his feet and trudge on, sometimes
running, sometimes stumbling,
carrying whatever it was that could not
be put down, would not be cast aside—
and besides, he would chide himself,
weren't they all as tired as he,
and hadn't they helped him, time
and again, on his way?
...

All around the altar, huge lianas
curled, unfurled the dark green
of their leaves to complement the red
of blood spilled there—a kind of Christmas
decoration, overhung with heavy vines
and over them, the stars.
When the angels came, messengers like birds
but with the oiled flesh of men, they hung
over the scene with smoldering swords,
splashing the world when they beat
their rain-soaked wings against the turning sky.

The child was bright in his basket
as a lemon, with a bitter smell from his wet
swaddling clothes. His mother bent
above him, singing a lullaby
in the liquid tongue invented
for the very young—short syllables
like dripping from an eave
mixed with the first big drops of rain
that fell, like tiny silver pears, from
the glistening fronds of palm. The three
who gathered there—old kings uncrowned:
the cockroach, condor, and the leopard, lords
of the cracks below the ground, the mountain
pass and the grass-grown plain—were not
adorned, did not bear gifts, had not
come to adore; they were simply drawn
to gawk at this recurrent, awkward son
whom the wind had said would spell
the end of earth as it had been.

Somewhere north of this familiar scene
the polar caps were melting, the water was
advancing in its slow, relentless
lines, swallowing the old
landmarks, swelling the
seas that pulled
the flowers and the great steel cities down.
The dolphins sport in the rising sea,
anemones wave their many arms like hair
on a drowned gorgon's head, her features
softened by the sea beyond all recognition.

On the desert's edge where the oasis dies
in a wash of sand, the sphinx seems to shift
on her haunches of stone, and the rain, as it runs down,
completes the ruin of her face. The Nile
merges with the sea, the waters rise
and drown the noise of earth. At the forest's
edge, where the child sleeps, the waters gather—
as if a hand were reaching for the curtain
to drop across the glowing, lit tableau.

When the waves closed over, completing the green
sweep of ocean, there was no time for mourning.
No final trump, no thunder to announce
the silent steal of waters; how soundlessly
it all went under: the little family
and the scene so easily mistaken
for an adoration. Above, more clouds poured in
and closed their ranks across the skies;
the angels, who had seemed so solid, turned
quicksilver in the rain.
Now, nothing but the wind
moves on the rain-pocked face
of the swollen waters, though far below
where giant squid lie hidden in shy tangles,
the whales, heavy-bodied as the angels,
their fins like vestiges of wings,
sing some mighty epic of their own—

a great day when the ships would all withdraw,
the harpoons fail of their aim, the land
dissolve into the waters, and they would swim
among the peaks of mountains, like eagles
of the deep, while far below them, the old
nightmares of earth would settle
into silt among the broken cities, the empty
basket of the child would float
abandoned in the seaweed until the work of water
unraveled it in filaments of straw,
till even that straw rotted
in the planetary thaw the whales prayed for,
sending their jets of water skyward
in the clear conviction they'd spill back
to ocean with their will accomplished
in the miracle of rain: And the earth
was without form and void, and darkness
was upon the face of the deep. And
the Spirit moved upon the face of the waters.
...

If the nose of the pig in the market of Firenze
has lost its matte patina, and shines, brassy,
even in the half light; if the mosaic saint
on the tiles of the Basilica floor is half gone,
worn by the gravity of solid soles, the passing
of piety; if the arms of Venus have reentered
the rubble, taken by time, her perennial lover,
mutilating even the memory of beauty;
and if
the mother, hiding with her child from
the death squads of brutality,
if she, trying to keep the child
quiet, to keep them from being found out,
holds her hand over his mouth, holds him
against her, tighter and tighter, until he stops
breathing;
if the restorer—trying to bring back
to perfection the masterpiece scarred by its
transit through time, wipes away
by mistake, the mysterious smile. . .
if what
loves, and love is, takes away what it aims
to preserve,
then here is the place to fall
silent, meaning well but in danger
of marring what we would praise, unable
to do more than wear down the marble
steps to the altar, smother the fire
we would keep from the wind's extinction,
or if, afraid
of our fear, we lift the lid from the embers, and send
abroad, into the parched night, a flight of sparks,
incendiary, dying to catch somewhere,
hungry for fuel, the past, its dry provision
tinder for brilliance and heat, prelude
to cold, and to ash. . .
...

Because of the first, the fear of wreck,
which they taught us to fear (though we learned
at once, and easily),
because of the wreck
that was expected (and metal given velocity
and heft to assure it)—
we became adepts in
rise above: how many versions: the church
steeple that took the eye straight up to
heaven (though it seemed snagged on
the cross-beam of that cross, torn blue
at the top, where sense leaked out). And
rise above, transcendence, on that higher
plane, the vertical direction of virtue (a bony
finger pointing up to where matter dissolves
into distaste for it):
the space program, expensive
tons of rocket (soon to be debris) fired off
the planet's crust at anything out there, pocked
moon, red rocky Mars, ever the upward
urge, carved in the marble arch of the old library
door under which generations passed,
hoping to rise above it all—

like the woman the magician levitates
over the table, her body floating an unlikely
inch or two above the velvet-draped plateau...
watch her hovering, weightless,
the crowd staring
in wonder, the trick of the thing still hidden,
and the magician doing something now
with his hands, a flurry of brilliant
silk in the air, as she floats
in the endlessness of art,
the magician
still waving his scarves, the air a bright
shatter of wings, doves from a hat,
our disbelief suspended,
while below, the wrecks accumulate:
scrap yard, broken concrete slabs, and
all those bodies not exempt from gravity,
beneath our notice as we ride
above it all, like froth on a wave
that will be water falling by the ton,
soon, when the tide turns.
...

Because of the first, the fear of wreck,
which they taught us to fear (though we learned
at once, and easily),
because of the wreck
that was expected (and metal given velocity
and heft to assure it)—
we became adepts in
rise above: how many versions: the church
steeple that took the eye straight up to
heaven (though it seemed snagged on
the cross-beam of that cross, torn blue
at the top, where sense leaked out). And
rise above, transcendence, on that higher
plane, the vertical direction of virtue (a bony
finger pointing up to where matter dissolves
into distaste for it):
the space program, expensive
tons of rocket (soon to be debris) fired off
the planet's crust at anything out there, pocked
moon, red rocky Mars, ever the upward
urge, carved in the marble arch of the old library
door under which generations passed,
hoping to rise above it all—

like the woman the magician levitates
over the table, her body floating an unlikely
inch or two above the velvet-draped plateau . . .
watch her hovering, weightless,
the crowd staring
in wonder, the trick of the thing still hidden,
and the magician doing something now
with his hands, a flurry of brilliant
silk in the air, as she floats
in the endlessness of art,
the magician
still waving his scarves, the air a bright
shatter of wings, doves from a hat,
our disbelief suspended,
while below, the wrecks accumulate:
scrap yard, broken concrete slabs, and
all those bodies not exempt from gravity,
beneath our notice as we ride
above it all, like froth on a wave
that will be water falling by the ton,
soon, when the tide turns.
...

joined by Emily Dickinson, Muriel Rukeyser, and Theodore Roethke
San Manuel the priest who kept
his poor parish in the faith
burnished their bright hope of heaven
(hope is a thing with feathers)

it is best not to think these days
about what what the newspapers report so reasonably
(I lived in the first century of world wars,
most days I was more or less insane)
today's weather an endless rain of feathers

when the passenger pigeon now extinct
had not yet been converted
to fashion slaughtered its plumage plucked
for the elegant hats of America's women
(those catlike immaculate
creatures for whom the world works)
when the migrating flocks still passed
overhead a billion strong the farmers said
bird lime turned the woods white
the sky was dark for a week

And San Manuel? Late in the story we learn
he did not believe in the hope
he kept alive believing as he did
(like his author) in the sustaining power
of fiction
...

The horns
of a bull
who was placed
before a mirror at the beginning
of human time;
in his fury
at the challenge of his double,
he has, from
that time to this,
been throwing himself against
the mirror, until
by now it is
shivered into millions of pieces—
here an eye, there
a hoof or a tuft
of hair; here a small wet shard made
entirely of tears.
And up there, below the spilt milk of
the stars, one
silver splinter—
parenthesis at the close of a long sentence,
new crescent,
beside it, red
asterisk of
Mars
...

Today, Pompeii—on view: the ultimate interruption,
permission to blame nature for the failure
to finish anything—to bake the bread, to put
the kids to bed on time, sew the tattered toga, ice
the wine, draw up your will, take the swill out back
to feed the pigs, do some small kindness to the poor,
write your senator (you hear that Rome's gone
rotten, and your taxes will be used for yet
another war) . . .
but never mind, when the smoke
and ash rain down, the mountain extending
its huge domain, the lava pouring in through
every door, night visiting by day—a final, solid
fact, the darkness closing down on the Poet's
House, her dog, and cave canem in mosaic tile
on the floor; that poem will not be written
she had planned, the one whose lines, so elegant,
when scanned, would make the mighty Virgil
weep with shame; the poem of 1,000 lines
that would be sung for 1,000 years—begun
just then, word one, it promised to make
effusive springs break forth from stone,
and warlike hearts repent their hardened ways,
and poor nostalgic Orpheus lay down his lyre
for good (and keep his head): this would have
come to pass—but for Vesuvius, a jealous
nature pouring its hot wrath on all her drafts,
while filling up the beds, the future,
with its furious, furnace breath—ah, such
a memorable excuse, catastrophic death—
but hey,
the tour is tiresome, the day is cold; in town
there are a dozen shops displaying skeletons
of bats, the Tears of Christ, and Davids, Davids
by the gross, effigies for sale at any price.
...