Overview
Eleanor Wilner’s poems attempt to absorb the shock of the wars and atrocities of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In their litany of loss, in their outrage and sorrow, they retain the joy in life, mercy for the mortal condition, and praise for the plenitude of nature and the gifts of human artistry.
As with her six earlier collections, these poems are drawn from the transpersonal realm of history and cultural memory, but they display an increasing horror at the bloody repetitions of history, its service of death, and the destructive savagery of power separated from intelligence and restraint. The poems describe “a sordid drama” in which the players wear “eyeless masks,” and the only thing time changes is the name of the enemy. Underneath it all, driving “the art that” in both senses “keeps nothing at bay,” swim the enormous formal energies of life, the transitive figure that moves on in the depths, something glimpsed in the first light, something stronger than hope.
“It is a relief to come across work in which a moral intelligence is matched by aesthetic refinement, in which the craft of the poems is equal to their concerns.”--Christian Wiman, Poetry
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226900339 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2010 |
| Series: | Phoenix Poets |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 120 |
| File size: | 239 KB |
About the Author
Eleanor Wilner is a former MacArthur Fellow and the author of six previous collections of poetry, including Otherwise and Sarah’s Choice, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
Read an Excerpt
Tourist in Hell
By ELEANOR WILNER
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2010 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-90032-2
Chapter One
"Man learns from history that man learns nothing from history." -Hegel
HISTORY AS CRESCENT MOON 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 OPENING THE EYES The dust of chiseled stone spackled the concrete floor, the sculptor all but finished with his work. It stood, enormously, on a branch of darkly veined marble, its body cut from a smooth and gleaming chunk of white that caught the light with such intensity you felt a need to look away, as if to look too long would blind. Its feathers, cut in sharp relief, catch the shadows; you can feel the power in its talons as they grasp the sculpted branch. But the great eyes of the owl, black orbs of obsidian, refuse the gaze-their blank and obdurate sheen mirrors only what it does not see. The cooled volcanic glass gives back the sculptor's face, so its indifference seems his own. The owl was to be his masterpiece- he who had torn for years the living forms from rock, exposed its veins, who found what granite hid or marble wore within; his owl would be freed from the burden of bad augur, released back to the wild from history, iconography, and from Athena- the armored, icy mind of war, what posed as wisdom, but was policy. Something was wrong with the eyes, the great stone owl inanimate, inert, for all the care he'd lavished on its form, its tensing on the branch, the slight lift of its wings. For hours he sat before it, unsatisfied, fury slowly growing at the failure of his hands. Then all at once he burst from his chair, and chisel in hand, attacked the black uncaring empty gaze. And as he split the center of each eye, as if to make the pupil see the light, the owl cried out-heart-scalding shriek that tore the night: cried out for what it could not help but see. WRECK AND RISE ABOVE 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: scrapyard, 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. THE GYRE The world was a globe that sat on a table in a fire-lit study, the table covered with a rich, tooled leather; while the man who spun the globe-matching countries with the map spread out below on the desk from which he reached an arm to turn the little effigy of world- was shifting borders in his head, so that the spinning orb began to glow with his desire, his designs. As if his dreams had given off a smoke, a thick fog cloaked and altered everything he saw- so even now, when all the corpses from that spin have long since rotted in the grave, the clouds have not dispersed, their swirling smoke obscures all but the twisted steel of a foregone conclusion, the world unmade, as centuries and cities fall, cascade into the landfill of history-worlds born on the waste of those that came before. As a glowing cloud of smoke will hang over a burning dump at night, and the bears and raccoons come out, eyes shining in the dark, to paw through the smoldering heaps- just so the historian sits, sifting and sifting entrails, cornices, motives, bones-all that is left to be indexed and filed, rearranged, given syntax and sense; above him, stuffed birds-a condor, a gull, a carrion crow, moth-eaten by time, look down on his labors with a bright, glassy-eyed malice from their dusty cases, and, stirring a little on their perches, try with beaks their walls of glass: here and there now, hairline cracks, and as night falls, the sound of taps. GEOPOLITICS Moon on the desert, a shimmer in the wash, nearby the pack rat is drawn to that pale, shifty light, his burrow and its hoard (they comfort him) left far below. But the glittering light eludes him as he darts off across the stony ground, small charcoal stroke in search of something bright; and the owl, unmoving as the cactus arm, has the greater need. Or, no, the wing span, and the speed. Like a note of ponderous brass in a play of pipes and shadows, the armadillo, laminated soul, fresh from nature's cannery, scuttles into view, makes his way across the wash-a dry gully waiting for rain ... close by, the dark grumbles, while further out, the planets burn like signal fires across the vacancy, their message our belittlement, far beyond the scrubby sky that mothers us, hovering, gray with its worry of clouds. The armadillo covers his own back, and with long claws digs furiously his tunnel in the hard desert clay, fearing invasion, and disappears into his own armored dark, taking the stars with him, as the horizon lightens toward dawn, and the owl closes his eyes, his mind filled with the small, satisfactory cries of the rat, his stomach with the rat's debris. IN A TIME OF WAR Flies, caught in the sap of the living tree, someday will be precious, dressed in amber-just so the past appears to the present, gemlike in its perfect preservation, the hardened gold of yesterday, a relic through which today's sun shines. But those who are caught in the sticky sap of actual time, insects in the odds against them, who struggle in the ooze, slowly sink into the mass, the numberless, anonymous dead ... till the atrocious becomes the mundane, our senses numb from the sheer litany of repetition. Let us, then, just watch this one small desperate fly, stuck first by the feet, and then, in its struggles, entangled entirely in the glob of sap, its wings heavy as a brass angel's, until it is all at once still, a dark speck in a bubble of sap oozing from the felled tree in a forest marked for the mill. How many millennia will pass before a tear-drop lavaliere of amber carrying its cargo of loss will adorn the vanity of another creature, the fly a fossil of a species no longer present on the Earth, the Earth itself a speck in a cosmos where galaxies are carded like cotton on a comb and pulled out into a distance where some new fabric is being spun and shimmers in the firelight of countless burning suns.
IN THAT DAWN "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven!" -Wordsworth We thought if we brought the statue down, the bronze man on a horse, the tyrant-hero, if we held the old armor up to the light, till it faded to a ghostly scrim, then the sun would pour through, the doors swing open, the window shades fly up of their own accord, and all would be well in the public square, the buckets lifted from the central fountain would overflow with a clear water, the man on the cross would step down, put on his clothes, and-a feather in his jaunty hat and a walking stick for the mountains-wave goodbye, taking with him and away forever the bleeding ikon of tortured flesh as an object of veneration. And the bells, the bells would play Mozart in the towers, and a fresh breeze would set the wind chimes playing, and-of course- birds, not seen in decades, would nest again in the blossoming branches-oh, it was a good dream, really, though now it lies in a child's book, and the library in which the book stood, on a low shelf that a child could reach, is burned to the ground, and the child with it; the city is under curfew, helmeted men patrol the ruined streets, where nothing stands but the bunkers-not the statues of the old founders, not the wall made entirely of mosaic tiles, not the firehouse with its great carved doors, nor the sandwich shop on the corner where, on his blanket, the little terrier slept, nose in his paws, and his dreams sweet. AFTER THE TSUNAMI No point anymore in thinking about the big wave, a thought you once could ride to oblivion, a way out of a bad story, end time, the way the Peter Weir film pulled out the stops like hairpins, let down its big surprise-horizon gone, the sky falling ... white-out, the Last Wave that ended the film, solved everything in one final dissolve to a blank screen. And it was all gone: conquest's white uneasy cast, the aboriginals who saw, drawing with sticks in the sand, how it would come, night vision enviable to the ones who invented light they could switch off, hold oceans on a strip of film, a trick of the lens, director's cut: the sea pulls out, and out, earth shifting its plates as if a giant turned in his sleep- and it all comes roaring back, oblivion's wet wall, ground zero in motion ... but it wasn't like Weir's white-out, only the credits coming up- it wasn't like that at all. * * * Imagine those believers who think "the Rapture" is for them, who think of themselves virtually lifted above the multitudes, distanced from it all on the big screen in the blue sky of a cruel delusion- while below, the stinking beaches are littered with bodies, and searching among them, the desolate, like women gleaning the fields after the harvest is done. As if Noah, when the waters of the flood drew back, when he saw what the waves had wrought, could have exulted. Or the dove, with its green meaning, returned to his trembling hand.
WHAT IT HINGES ON When everything is going just one way, and seems to be headed for a cul-de-sac or some stunning culmination ... all at once, a creak (as a rusty hinge warns of an intruder in the night)- the wind from another quarter takes the sail, the cage door opens or the lid slams shut: and all our plans are so much smoke, a handful of torn paper, confetti in the air that swirls-a letter here, a sentence there, years of work litter the field that lies outside the town that flood or fire took back, as the great tectonic plates grind out their harmonies below the sea, and the earth turns in its restless sleep, spun by what we cannot see, the hand that is no hand, but brings us calm to think it so, and think it ours to smite our enemies, forgetting as we turn it to a fist, it is ourselves curled, blind as newborn kittens, in the palm. THINKING ABOUT UNAMUNO'S SAN MANUEL BUENO, MÁRTIR San Manuel the priest who kept his poor parish in the faith burnished their bright hope of heaven (hope is the 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 mornings I would be 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. SITE VISIT By then doctors and poets Would have found a cure for prayer -Fady Joudah A cure for prayer, and the long vigil at the gates, nostalgia's broken bubbles in the blood, aneurysm of a dream; the double helix like a winding stair, a twisted vine on which the monkeys climb, (the way up is the way down); they live on captive air in the cages we construct-please think of bleak confinement, steel walls; think of Virgil by the sinkhole at the mouth of Hell, beckoning; he points: above on His throne of clouds sits Majesty in burnished robes, below the fires roast the burning flesh of those who must be guilty of what was done to them, agonies it took genius to describe- didn't we understand that the punishment fits the crime?-though the damned were from a distant time: we had to search the footnotes for their names. Hell is the dungeon where God's shadow falls, cast by the monumental, obdurate cliff that sits beside a restless sea, whose migrant waves keep eating at its face, pulling it slowly down, turning the intractable to sand, grain by grain, motes in the burning eye of sun, while fish hawks prey along the changing shore; what breaks upon the broken rocks is spray. (Continues...)
Excerpted from Tourist in Hell by ELEANOR WILNER Copyright © 2010 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
One
History as Crescent Moon
Opening the Eyes
Wreck and rise above
The Gyre
Geopolitics
In a Time of War
In That Dawn
After the Tsunami
What It Hinges On
Thinking about Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno, Mártir
Site Visit
Back Then, We Called It “The War”
The Show Must Go On
Magnificat
Two
Establishment
Winter Lambs
Rendition, with Flag
Postcard with Statue of Liberty, No Message
Cold Dawn of the Day When Bush Was Elected for a Second Term
The Raven’s Text
The meteor
High Noon
Saturday Night
Three
Voices from the Labyrinth
Minos
Ariadne
Daedalus
The Minotaur
Meditation on DNA with Gene Splices from Shakespeare’s Sonnets
An Ode to Asymmetry
To Think What We Might Have . . .
Four Flats, Getting Dark Soon, Nothing to Do but Walk
Like I really like that
Encounter in the Local Pub
Four
What loves, takes away
Restored to Blue
Vermeer’s Girl, a Restoration
Trees, even at this distance
the palest flowers / ash, snow . . .
Larger to Those Who Stay
Welcome to the dollar bin
Meditation on Lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73
Harmony Bowl
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)
Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On
The Morning After
Of a Word
Headlong for That Fair Target
Mine eyes have seen the glory of . . .
Tracking
Notes