|
| |
|
Eleanor Wilner
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Eleanor Wilner is the author of seven books of poems: Tourist in Hell (U. of Chicago, fall, 2010), The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon, 2004), Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon 1998), Otherwise (U. of Chicago, 1993), Sarah's Choice (U. of Chicago, 1990), Shekhinah (U. of Chicago, 1985), maya (U. of Massachusetts, 1979), a translation of Euripides' Medea (U. of Pennsylvania, 1998) as well as a book on visionary imagination, Gathering the Winds (Johns Hopkins, 1975). She has taught at many colleges and universities, most recently at the University of Chicago, Smith College, and Northwestern University. She currently teaches in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
|
|
|
Eleanor Wilner – Four Poems |
 |
|
Minos
lean close I am only the echo of a voice
husk of power king of cobwebs cast off shell of the cicada
the singing insect long since flown memory a spectral thread
broken line across the centuries perforations
a place to tear open again the rift in time string of tears
the clew that led from one room of the dream to the next
became a flame burning along a fuse until
it lit the black night of the Aegean
gone our port of pleasure there pause again at the word
pleasure
the way wind lingers in bright air
turns hot Sirocco stirs the nerves again blows the dry earth
Ariadne in a dress of dust grows indistinct
( no, stay a moment . . . I want to know�)
the dolphin leaps only on the peeling blue of the painted wall
a lizard brushes my foot Theseus only a name for the passage of power
from one place to another
we were lovers of peace of art the winding measures of dance
of poems yes we were liars always new gods
thirsty for blood swallow the old I am tired
where are the vineyards the arbors
they say the way in is the way out we end
at the place of beginning black sails for the old kings
white in the hold for the next
Ariadne
They say I placed the clew in his hand (even my father shamed came to believe it)
but it was their story told long after
what happened left us beggars in our once rich island
before the earth erupted before the sea rose
we were a city without walls
our complications were within artists traders worshippers of the changing moon
we were ourselves the labyrinth and the clew
I was she who served the Lady who wears the crescent holds the twin serpents
who is the reel around which the thread is wound now
even the olive trees nothing but pillars of smoke and I standing among ruins
looked up into the eyes of Greece fierce bearers of spears gods of sun and thunder
carrying shields on which we were history
merely an old dream of peace the white bull grazing in the wild grass
the cows deep in perpetual summer
the ibex abroad in the mountain poppies aflame like red silks in the field
gone in the fiery night
the past only a painting crumbling from the walls
and I a figment now a shade who flits
along the labyrinth of time history twisted like a skein of yarn
back on the spindle back to the spinner's hand
I run my hand along but where is the wall
where is the world
(what have they done to my brother)
of course we went mad when they came
there was so much death they seemed
almost its master
Daedalus serves a new god
and I a foreign figure in a Greek story
the Greek key is a maze
it is their design
fit for the walls of their temples of stone
finding us weak
they took what they say we gave
I shall free myself
from that fiction as soon as I find
the right turn
a way out
of these
lines
Daedalus
always there are questions always answers disagree
like quarrelsome neighbors who argue about everything
where the fence goes who owns the fig tree whose god made
the world green whose dog tore the garden up whose story
is true whose story is this we are in I should know
I am Daedalus artificer artist teller of tales trapped
in the maze of my own invention Dante whirling
in the circles of an exile's hell vile dreams of monsters
the torture of my enemies incendiary I am every exile
in my mind ascending living under one emperor after another
I am the ringmaster the man on the merry-go-round horse
I am the architect who comes home to a ruined house
Marcel who ends one thousand pages with a man beginning to write
Finnegan's scribe with the bad eyes the many tongues
the wake into which we sail to begin again
born tired the poet whose way forward is the way
back I Daedalus was hired to map the underground its twisted ways
keep it secret put the lid on a painted ceiling of stars
still air extends itself sun dazzles the sea
a scatter of floating feathers marks the limits of art
Knossos drowns in sand again gnosis down the bloody drain of history
and I only a man in search of an exit hired to construct it
The Minotaur
Do not mistake me I am not what you think
what you think is polluted by what you were told
if man is the measure then man is the monster
See I have taken the long gold clew in my mouth
I am reeling it in reeling it in
a man is attached
Theseus an obsolete hero sent long ago this time
I have pulled the knife from the heart of the plot
even as I pull the line that he holds in his hand
and thinks it his own see I am drawing him
closer and closer I can smell his fear now
the line he believed would lead him out is
pulling him inexorably in I never
let go I was born under the sign of
Taurus we hold on whatever
we've got stays caught
I am hauling and
hauling
until
we
are
face to face
you are looking into my eyes
I into yours
now you see who we are
tangled in the spiraling threads that curl
round and round
the central axis of the double helix
along the nucleotides of creation where the past
is always with us and always open
to change I have met you here because it is time
there is so much past it is late just time enough
for an exit
|
| © 2010 The Cortland Review |
|
|
