Eleanor Wilner Poems

It was a pure white cloud that hung there
in the blue, or a jellyfish on a waveless
sea, suspended high above us; we were
the creatures in the weeds below.
...

There are always, in each of us,
these two: the one who stays,
the one who goes away -
...

Nights, by the light of whatever would burn:
tallow, tinder and the silken rope
of wick that burns slow, slow
...

And they will gather by the well,
its dark water a mirror to catch whatever
stars slide by in the slow precession of
the skies, the tilting dome of time,
...

To grasp, like Prometheus, the fire — without
the power to give it away ...
— Betty Adcock
At first a silhouette on the horizon, then
turning solid, like Schiller coming up the path to meet
the adorable sisters, and they, pretending not to watch,

their hearts, all the time, pounding,
driven by the same spring force (that would

tear them apart), the same force that drives
the salmon upriver, against the current, the odds,
back to the home pool, even as
the autumn mind, in spite of itself,

turns backward, with the same feverish glow as autumn
gives to the summer's leaves, a deceptive glamour,
warming the past with an amber light, like brandy
held up to the fire, or the sun sinking at dusk
into the water, into the Baltic Sea
each night, where, in the mythical depths

of Lithuanian folktale, lies the amber castle
of the female sun, burning in the dark water,
a globe the color of harvest, aglow
there in the depths of the past, though
the amber, congealed sap of a once

living force, is broken into bits, and the mythic
castle with it — strung now as beads, and hung,
a charm, around the neck of a daughter,
like the one in a Greek dream, picking flowers
when the earth opened,

and in a swirl of violet cape and the pounding of hoofs,
the dark god broke out of the earth
driven by the same spring force, consequential
and mortal,
and up there, hanging over the mythic

fields of what recurs and recurs (though never the same,
and never to be reconciled) — what is that?
A hot air balloon filled

with passengers who paid to be raised
in a basket, to be up there looking down on
the ground where they live, a place shrunken now
beneath their gaze, while their bloated shadow floats
like a jellyfish in a green sea, barely a smudge on the pastures below,
the trace of their passage less than a breath of smoke
from a coal-fired engine — a blast of tarnished air
from the actual past, heavy metal delivered from memory.
Useless to warn the girl, whose

hand will always be reaching out for the flowers, or
the sisters inflamed with Schiller, as he with the tricolor
dream of a world he could never inhabit ...
useless to comfort

the eyeless Tiresias who knew how terrible was
wisdom when it knew itself useless,
and useless to read

the names on the shining black wall of the Vietnam
Memorial, the text of exactly what war has accomplished — 
and look, there, standing high above the tragic scene,

not the little figures of the wise ancients that Yeats saw
carved into the deep blue stone — but there, standing high
above Arlington, against the blank lapis of the sky:
a horse with the torso and head of a man, yes,
it is Chiron, the last of the hybrids, the wise and terribly wounded
centaur for whom immortality was a curse,
and he gave it away

to Prometheus, who stole the god's fire and gave it away,
as art gives the power to give it away,
for that fire is the gift that cannot be held,
for it will burn to an ash those (born
and born again, war without end) who would hold it.To grasp, like Prometheus, the fire — without
the power to give it away ...
— Betty Adcock
At first a silhouette on the horizon, then
turning solid, like Schiller coming up the path to meet
the adorable sisters, and they, pretending not to watch,

their hearts, all the time, pounding,
driven by the same spring force (that would

tear them apart), the same force that drives
the salmon upriver, against the current, the odds,
back to the home pool, even as
the autumn mind, in spite of itself,

turns backward, with the same feverish glow as autumn
gives to the summer's leaves, a deceptive glamour,
warming the past with an amber light, like brandy
held up to the fire, or the sun sinking at dusk
into the water, into the Baltic Sea
each night, where, in the mythical depths

of Lithuanian folktale, lies the amber castle
of the female sun, burning in the dark water,
a globe the color of harvest, aglow
there in the depths of the past, though
the amber, congealed sap of a once

living force, is broken into bits, and the mythic
castle with it — strung now as beads, and hung,
a charm, around the neck of a daughter,
like the one in a Greek dream, picking flowers
when the earth opened,

and in a swirl of violet cape and the pounding of hoofs,
the dark god broke out of the earth
driven by the same spring force, consequential
and mortal,
and up there, hanging over the mythic

fields of what recurs and recurs (though never the same,
and never to be reconciled) — what is that?
A hot air balloon filled

with passengers who paid to be raised
in a basket, to be up there looking down on
the ground where they live, a place shrunken now
beneath their gaze, while their bloated shadow floats
like a jellyfish in a green sea, barely a smudge on the pastures below,
the trace of their passage less than a breath of smoke
from a coal-fired engine — a blast of tarnished air
from the actual past, heavy metal delivered from memory.
Useless to warn the girl, whose

hand will always be reaching out for the flowers, or
the sisters inflamed with Schiller, as he with the tricolor
dream of a world he could never inhabit ...
useless to comfort

the eyeless Tiresias who knew how terrible was
wisdom when it knew itself useless,
and useless to read

the names on the shining black wall of the Vietnam
Memorial, the text of exactly what war has accomplished — 
and look, there, standing high above the tragic scene,

not the little figures of the wise ancients that Yeats saw
carved into the deep blue stone — but there, standing high
above Arlington, against the blank lapis of the sky:
a horse with the torso and head of a man, yes,
it is Chiron, the last of the hybrids, the wise and terribly wounded
centaur for whom immortality was a curse,
and he gave it away

to Prometheus, who stole the god's fire and gave it away,
as art gives the power to give it away,
for that fire is the gift that cannot be held,
for it will burn to an ash those (born
and born again, war without end) who would hold it.
...

Whose woods these are I think I know ...

The landings had gone wrong; white silk,
like shrouds, covered the woods.
The trees had trapped the flimsy fabric
in their web—everywhere the harnessed bodies
hung—helpless, treading air
like water.
We thought to float down
easily—a simple thing
like coming home: feet first,
a welcome from the waiting fields,
a gentle fall in clover.

We hadn't counted on this
wilderness, the gusts of wind
that took us over; we were surprised
by the tenacity of branching wood,
its reach, and how impenetrable
the place we left, and thought we knew,
could be.
Sometimes now, as we sway, unwilling
pendulums that mark the time,
we still can dream
someone will come and cut us down.
There is nothing here but words, the calls
we try the dark with—hoping for a human
ear, response, a rescue party.
But all we hear is other
voices like our own, other bodies
tangled in the lines,
the repetition of a cry from every tree:

I can't help you, help me.
...

By the stream, where the ground is soft
and gives, under the slightest pressure—even
the fly would leave its footprint here
and the paw of the shrew the crescent
of its claws like the strokes of a chisel
in clay; where the lightest chill, lighter
than the least rumor of winter, sets the reeds
to a kind of speaking, and a single drop of rain
leaves a crater to catch the first silver
glint of sun when the clouds slide away
from each other like two tired lovers,
and the light returns, pale, though brightened
by the last chapter of late autumn:
copper, rusted oak, gold aspen, and the red
pages of maple, the wind leafing through to the end
the annals of beech, the slim volumes
of birch, the elegant script of the ferns ...

for the birds, it is all
notations for a coda, for the otter
an invitation to the river,
and for the deer—a dream
in which to disappear, light-footed
on the still open book of earth,
adding the marks of their passage,
adding it all in, waiting only
for the first thick flurry of snowflakes
for cover, soft cover that carries
no title, no name.
...

came in an envelope with no return address;
she was small, wore wrinkled dress of figured
cotton, full from neck to ankles, with a button
of bone at the throat, a collar of torn lace.
She was standing before a monumental house—
on the scale you see in certain English films:
urns, curved drives, stone lions, and an entrance far
too vast for any home. She was not of that place,
for she had a foreign look, and tangled black hair,
and an ikon, heavy and strange, dangling from
an oversize chain around her neck, that looked
as if some tall adult had taken it from his,
and hung it there as a charm to keep her safe
from a world of infinite harm that soon
would take him far from her, and leave her
standing, as she stood now—barefoot, gazing
without expression into distance, away
from the grandeur of that house, its gravel
walks and sculpted gardens. She carried a basket
full of flames, but whether fire or flowers
with crimson petals shading toward a central gold,
was hard to say—though certainly, it burned,
and the light within it had nowhere else
to go, and so fed on itself, intensified its red
and burning glow, the only color in the scene.
The rest was done in grays, light and shadow
as they played along her dress, across her face,
and through her midnight hair, lively with bees.
At first they seemed just errant bits of shade,
until the humming grew too loud to be denied
as the bees flew in and out, as if choreographed
in a country dance between the fields of sun
and the black tangle of her hair.
Without warning
a window on one of the upper floors flew open—
wind had caught the casement, a silken length
of curtain filled like a billowing sail—the bees
began to stream out from her hair, straight
to the single opening in the high facade. Inside,
a moment later—the sound of screams.

The girl—who had through all of this seemed
unconcerned and blank—all at once looked up.
She shook her head, her mane of hair freed
of its burden of bees, and walked away,
out of the picture frame, far beyond
the confines of the envelope that brought her
image here—here, where the days grow longer
now, the air begins to warm, dread grows to
fear among us, and the bees swarm.
...

To turn a stone
with its white squirming
underneath, to pry the disc
from the sun's eclipse—white heat
coiling in the blinded eye: to these malign
necessities we come
from the dim time of dinosaurs
who crawled like breathing lava
from the earth's cracked crust, and swung
their tiny heads above the lumbering tons
of flesh, brains no bigger than a fist
clenched to resist the white flash
in the sky the day the sun-flares
pared them down to relics for museums,
turned glaciers back, seared Sinai's
meadows black—the ferns withered, the swamps
were melted down to molten mud, the cells
uncoupled, recombined, and madly
multiplied, huge trees toppled to the ground,
the slow life there abandoned hope,
a caterpillar stiffened in the grass.
Two apes, caught in the act of coupling,
made a mutant child
who woke to sunlight wondering, his mother
torn by the huge new head
that forced the narrow birth canal.

As if compelled to repetition
and to unearth again
white fire at the heart of matter—fire
we sought and fire we spoke,
our thoughts, however elegant, were fire
from first to last—like sentries set to watch
at Argos for the signal fire
passed peak to peak from Troy
to Nagasaki, triumphant echo of the burning
city walls and prologue to the murders
yet to come—we scan the sky
for that bright flash,
our eyes stared white from watching
for the signal fire that ends
the epic—a cursed line
with its caesura, a pause
to signal peace, or a rehearsal
for the silence.
...

The unicorn is an easy prey: its horn
in the maiden's lap is an obvious
twist, a tamed figure—like the hawk
that once roamed free, but sits now, fat and hooded,
squawking on the hunter's wrist. It's easy
to catch what no longer captures
the mind, long since woven in,
a faded tapestry on a crumbling wall
made by the women who wore keys
at their waists and in their sleep came
hot dreams of wounded knights left bleeding
in their care, who would wake the next morning
groaning from the leftover lance in the groin,
look up into the round blond face beaming down
at them thinking 'mine,' and say: 'angel.'
Such beasts are easy to catch; their dreams
betray them. But the hard prey is the one
that won't come bidden.

By these signs you will know it:
when you lift your lure
out of the water, the long plastic line
will be missing its end: the lure and the hook
will be gone, and the line will swing free
in the air, so light it will be without
bait or its cunning
sharp curl of silver. Or when you pull
your net from the stream, it will be eaten
as if by acid, its fine mesh sodden shreds.

Or when you go at dawn to check your traps,
their great metal jaws will be wrenched
open, the teeth blunt with rust
as if they had lain for years in the rain.
Or when the thunderstorm suddenly breaks
in the summer, next morning
the computer's memory will be blank.

Look then for the blank card, the sprung trap,
the net's dissolve, the unburdened
line that swings free in the air.
There. By day, go empty-handed to the hunt
and come home the same way
in the dark.
...