Eleanor Wilner

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.

Nights, by the light of whatever would burn: tallow, tinder and the silken rope of wick that burns slow, slow we wove the baskets from the long gold strands of wheat that were another silk: worm soul spun the one, yellow seed in the dark soil, the other. The fields lay fallow, swollen with frost, expectant winter. Mud clung to the edges of our gowns; we had hung back like shadows on the walls of trees and watched. In the little circles that our tapers threw, murdered men rose red in their clanging armor, muttered words that bled through the bars of iron masks:the lord who sold us to the glory fields, lied.

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. . .

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.