Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2017
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About this ebook
A major new collection from the winner of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry
Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change.
In these poems, well-known figures step out of old texts to alter their stories and new figures arise out of the local air—a girl with a fury of bees in her hair, homesick statues that step down from their pedestals, a bat cave whose altar bears a judgment on our worship of war, and a frog whose spring wakening invites our own. In the process, ancient myths are naturalized while nature is newly mythologized in the service of life.
Before Our Eyes features widely anthologized works such as “Sarah’s Choice” and “Reading the Bible Backwards.” In the new poems, Wilner records the bewildering public shocks of the current moment, when civic life is under threat, when language itself is attacked, and when poetry’s lens of collective imagination becomes a way to resist falsity, to seek meaning, and to really see what is before our eyes.
Read more from Eleanor Wilner
Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets
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Before Our Eyes - Eleanor Wilner
ROETHKE
NEW POEMS (2011–2017)
I Fair is foul, and foul is fair
WHEN VISION NARROWS TO A SINGLE BEAM OF LIGHT
For years he had been hidden, quiet,
huge head on his paws,
almost a sphinx in his composure,
a figure waiting
for a breeze to move the dense
green canopy of leaves overhead,
enough to bring a hair-thin laser line
of light down
into the endless twilight
below;
he had been patient, waiting
for the underbrush to open, for a low
wind to enter, ruffling his fur, astir
along his spine, then a gravelly
purr within, slowly
the pink
mouth
opening
into a yawn …
if you were not afraid
you could see how the light
makes his wet teeth shine
as he runs his tongue along them,
how his languid stretching shoves aside
years of debris the forest shed,
dry leaves like dead laws,
how his claws unfurl as he breaches
the hedge that had held him close, how
this small wind,
this one thin line of light suffices
to open the waking tiger to our view—
that line of light a burning fuse
meant to measure
the diminishing distance
between the tiger
and us.
TRACKING
(pace Robert Frost)
No light in the woods, a cold rain
falls, damp penetrating every cell,
lichens spread, mushrooms push up
their blind, gray heads; at every step
your feet sink into the soaking loam,
the chill deepens, no way to keep warm,
nowhere to rest, and too much rain
to make a fire, and high above, a circling
shape—a thrumming sound: the drones
are tracking, even here. You thought that
where the trails diverged, if you found
the way that those who went before
had gone, you might escape—Though
as for that the passing there had worn
them really about the same.
So any choice had been absurd,
based on little but the need to move,
old maps, a hunch, the flip of a coin,
while the sound overhead beat
its alarm (was it real, or in your head?),
it followed the way that you had gone,
and something was tearing the leaves up there—
whirring, setting the nerves on edge,
the rain falling, a slant wind driving it
into your face, and the markers
missing, though the others had gone
this way before, of that you felt sure,
and none had come back, not one
had come back.
You stumble forward
along the path, like one who is carrying
a message in code to a city under siege,
a city that may have succumbed
to disease, or hunger, or fire, or worse …
yet still the message burns in your hand,
in spite of all, it impels your flight,
though the rains fall, the path darkens,
the drone is loud and panic threatens—
you go on, you brush the dripping
branches away, you shout a curse
at the tracking drone, you have
lost the path, you go on.
THE AQUARIUM
As we are standing by a tank
its glass has caught the faces
of us all ephemeral on the solid glass
a spectral crowd our eyes look back at us
away from what we’re gazing at the lustrous
cruising bodies of the captive fish
that circle endlessly in the enormous glowing
tube in which caught species swim …
we watch the glittering victims
of our showcase appetite and for
the flashing fins of passing things
we watch our fading faces watching us …
where to place the eyes
in such a scene its endless back and forth
so circumscribed trapped on the tank’s
reflective glass imprisoned in its lit
transparent case detainees
of the deep shimmering faces where
through each other’s masks we see
the bodies turn and turn again to fit
the walls of glass our faces shift and flicker
in the pulsing waves of light the water throws
this glimmering show with nowhere
else to go the gaze is locked in place
fixed on itself and all the life inside
comes round again again and circles back
UNDERWORLD
The black mouth opens in the white
façade, our boat slides in; at first
it’s dark in the tunnel, a motor hums,
the little boat cuts the black water
like a fin,
we’re caught in a Möbius strip
of song, closed curve, it must go on, and on,
and suddenly, round the bend they come
from some drenched honeycomb
in which the poisoned bees are caught
and spun,
and now, they’re all around us,
in the glowing artificial light, turning slowly
on their stands, staring with the fixed and
painted grin of dolls, a music box world
that turns and turns, wound-up dolls
and windmill blades, in a stupor
of cheer and hidden gears,
which hold them in a common grip,
and as they spin, they seem to sing,
because they’re made to seem to sing,
the song is all the world they’re in—
the walls
breathe damp as our boat slides by
kitsch pagodas, cuckoo clocks,
a Taj Mahal, grass skirts hula hula
under ersatz palms—
the curving tunnel moves us on,
we sense dark waters churn below
as we pass the whirl of dressed-up dolls,
dressed as if for a costume ball, who spin
and sing, and sing and spin,
around they go,
beguiling, infantile, and dead: each
with the same round head, wide eyes,
so clean and sweet—
as if below
the killing fields of history’s endless
wars, Elysium’s bright waterways
forever wind, filled with blissful
little dolls, androids all, in the singing
tunnels of the underworld—
a sign
reminds us to keep our heads down,
and our hands inside the boat,
as the walls close in, the dolls sing on,
dum dedum dum dum dedum,
dum dedum dum dum dedum …
THE PHOTOGRAPHER ON ASSIGNMENT
Election, 2016
Owl scream, restless sleep, Alaska’s
midnight sun, high noon all night, unnatural
to the body’s mind. The camera falters
in my hand. And I am cold, observing here
so near the pole, where, all summer, the sun
is sleepless, but the night is cold, even the shutter
sticks from the cold, stutters, deep disquiet
in the veins, as I watch the she-owl
guarding her young, beaks an open-mouthed Y
of hunger. No cover in this tundra but low shrub,
too long a winter has kept life close
to the ground, where the lemmings thrive,
plentiful in the stunted grass. I watch
the owl soar on opened wings, hunting
while the female guards the nest; again
and again he strikes—lemming after lemming,
and since the sun stays up, the lemmings
stand revealed; they don’t conceal themselves
but hope to warn their predators away
with their small, fanged aggression—
easy targets, all.
In the unforgiving light, the owl
spins overhead, talons open as he dives—
the lemmings pile up; the nestlings, stuffed,
can eat no more, but, his prey so eager, so exposed,
the owl keeps hunting, lemming after lemming
dropping from his claws.
The sun burns, the owl hunts,
the lemmings are a bleeding pile
of useless flesh and fur
that grows and grows
beside the sated nest.
That is the photo I bring home: a monument
to the harvest of that white night.
PARABLE OF THE EYES
Post-election, 2016
Somewhere in America, on the plains,
is a silo full of eyes.
They are closed,
shut tight, though, now and then, a few
tears run, and a rivulet of salty water
shudders the piles in the murk
of that great bin, like storage lockers
where people put things, stuff they can’t
remember why they bought—once
valued things that got in the way
as they moved from here to there,
and there to here:
here, where the bells toll
day and night—deep bronze the sound,
its slow decay goes on and on,
and the eyeless try to drown the sound,
sit down to the TV news, when
the knock of the fist comes on the door,
and you can hear the grinding of gears
as the trucks pull up outside,
and the eyes, locked in
the heartland silo, suddenly blink
and open wide, and all they see
are other eyes
in all that darkness
staring back.
ELEGY IN GLASS AND STONE
Crows working the ground,
picking at husks. Harvest
one place starves the rest,
crosswinds can’t be read,
and nothing can parse
the syntax of the soul.
Listen: it’s the thin wail
of a world gone wrong;
what takes cover under
the tongue is the song
that won’t be sung, the
waters are rising, the sun
has sunk behind the many-
storied towers of glass,
catching the last ver-
milion light; inside,
rooms an empty cash
write-off, sheets of glass
a sheath around vacancy.
Nothing breathes inside.
Below, the wind picks up
a plastic bag and fills it
like a sail; it spins across
our line of sight, is caught
and replicated in those
thousand panes of glass,
the walls become a tower
of animated trash. So close
to Wall St. now, you can
almost hear the crash.
Out
there,
as
Liberty
lifts
her torch of
gold, cold
on her island
rock, Ishmael,
carrying the drowned
Queequeg in his arms, stumbles
with his burden to the shore.
DAEDALUS, THE EXILE, THINKS OF HIS SON
It wasn’t the sun. Or that he flew too high—
lots of boys do that, and live;
it wasn’t that he didn’t hear me, his father,
shout to warn him;
it wasn’t that he was boy and dream and muscle
and sheathed sword;
it was whose son he was, not one of theirs.
So, as he circled above them,
wings spread, in the pure delight of feeling
free—it enraged them;
they ranted, they recoiled, they took aim.
In the labyrinth
I built for the creature, the prison that became
my own, the central chamber is empty now,
its straw moldy, the creature has fled;
I, who alone knew the plan
of those bewildering corridors, returned.
I led him out. His is the huge, horned
shadow you see, moving always a little ahead
of you, always a little ahead
of whatever happens next.
UNDER THE TABLE
The production of sound signals by body rapping or drumming … occurs most commonly in colonies that occupy wooden or carton nests … workers of the carpenter ants … can be launched into drumming by any sign that their nest has