Eleanor Wilner

for Larry Levis So it is here, then, after so long, and after all— as the light turns in the leaves in the old golden way of fall, as the small beasts dig to the place at the roots where survival waits, cowardly crouching in the dark, as the branches begin to stretch into winter, freed of their cheerful burden of green, then it comes home, the flea-ridden bitch of desolation, a thin dog with its ribs exposed like a lesson in mathematics, in subtraction; it comes home, to find its bowl empty—then the numberless things for which to be grateful dissolve like the steam from a fire just doused with water on a day of overcast grays, lined by a cold slanting rain— it is October, that season when Death goes public, costumed, when the talking heads on the TV screen float up smiling at the terrible news, their skin alight with the same strange glow fish give off when they have been dead a week or more, as the gas company adds odor for warning that the lines may be leaking, the sweet smell of disaster hanging, invisible, in the air, a moment before you strike the match— it is then, brother, that I think of you, of your Caravaggio, of the head of Goliath swung by its hair, wearing the artist’s own weary expression, exhausted of everything but its desire for that beautiful David he used to be; and I think of all the boys walking the streets each carrying the severed head of the man he will become—and the way I bear it is to think of you, grinning, riding high in the cart leaving the scene, a pair of huge horses hauling the wagon, a fine mist rising from their damp shoulders, unconcerned with what hangs, nailed to the museum walls—luckily the fall of Icarus has nothing to do with them, nor the ruined Goliath who fell like a forest, nor the wretched Salomes with their blood-splattered platters, nor the huge stone griffins sobbing at the gates to Valhalla as the litters are carried past ... the dark eyes of the horses are opaque with wisdom, their hoofs strike the pavements with such a musical decision, the derisive curl of their lips is so like the mysterious smile on the angel at Chartres, on Kuan Yin, on the dolphin, as they pull the cart safe through the blizzards of Main Street, the snow slowly swallowing the signs though the crossing light beckons— a soft glowing green like some spectral Eden in the blank white swirl of the storm. The stallion neighs once, sends a warm cloud of breath into the snow-filled air, and the mare isn’t scared yet—at least she’s still pulling. There’s a barn out there somewhere, as they plow through the light’s yellow aura of caution, its warm glow foretelling what hides in the storm: a stall full of gold, where the soul— that magician—can wallow and winter in straw.

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.

Unlike Francis Bacon, we no longer believe in the little patterns we make of the chaos of history. —Overheard remark As he looked up from his glass, its quickly melting ice, into the bisected glowing demonic eyes of the goat, he sensed that something fundamental had shifted, or was done. As if, after a life of enchantment, he had awakened, like Bottom, wearing the ears of an ass, and the only light was a lanthorn, an ersatz moon. It was not that the calendar hadn’t numbered the days with an orbital accuracy, its calculations exact, but like a man who wants to hang a hammock in his yard, to let its bright net cradle him, but only has one tree, so he — wild and aware of it — knew he had lost the order he required, and with it, rest — his thoughts only a sagging bundle of loose ends, and the heart, a naked animal in search of a pelt, that once fell for every Large Meaning it could wrap itself in, as organs are packed in ice for transit from one ending to the next, an afterlife of parts — and the whole? Exorbitant claim — not less than all, and oddly spelled; its ear rhyme is its opposite, the great hole in the heart of things. The goat, he noticed, had a rank smell, feral. Unnerved, he looks away, watches the last of his ice as it melts, the way some godlike eye might see the mighty glaciers in a slow dissolve back into sea. He notes how incommensurate the simile, a last attempt to dignify his shaking gaze, and reaches for the bill; he’s damned if the goat will pay.

The cave looked much like any other from a little distance but as we approached, came almost to its mouth, we saw its walls within that slanted up into a dome were beating like a wild black lung— it was plastered and hung with the pulsing bodies of bats, the organ music of the body’s deep interior, alive, the sacred cave with its ten thousand gleaming eyes near the clustered rocks where the sea beat with the leather wings of its own dark waves. Below the bat-hung, throbbing walls, an altar stood, glittering with guano, a stucco sculpture like a Gaudi church, berserk Baroque, stone translated into flux—murk and mud and the floral extravagance of wet sand dripped from a giant hand, giving back blessing, excrement—return for the first fruits offered to the gods. We stayed outside, superior with fear, like tourists peering through a door, whose hanging beads rattle in the air from one who disappeared into the dim interior; we thought of the caves of Marabar, of a writer who entered and never quite emerged— the caves’ echoing black emptiness a tunnel in the English soul where he is wandering still. So the bat cave on the Bali coast, not far from Denpasar, holds us off, and beckons ... Standing there now, at the mouth of the cave—this time we enter, feel inside the flutter of those many hearts, the radiant heat of pumping veins, the stretch of wing on bone like a benediction, and the familiar faces of this many-headed god, benevolent as night is to the weary—the way at dark the cave releases them all, how they must lift like the foam on a wave breaking, how many they are as they enter the starlit air, and scatter in wild wide arcs in search of fruit, the sweet bites of mosquito ... while the great domes of our own kind slide open, the eye that watches, tracks the skies, and the huge doors roll slowly back on the hangars, the planes push out their noses of steel, their wings a bright alloy of aluminum and death, they roar down the runways, tear into the night, their heavy bodies fueled from sucking at the hidden veins of earth; they leave a trail of fire behind them as they scar the air, filling the dreams of children, sleeping—anywhere, Chicago, Baghdad—with blood, as the bombs drop, as the world splits open, as the mothers reach for their own in the night of the falling sky, madness in method, nature gone into reverse ... here, nearly unperturbed, the bats from the sacred cave fill the night with their calls, high-pitched, tuned to the solid world as eyes to the spectrum of light, gnats to the glow of a lamp—the bats circle, the clouds wheel, the earth turns pulling the dome of stars among the spinning trees, blurring the sweet globes of fruit, shaped exactly to desire—dizzy, we swing back to the cave on our stiff dark wings, the sweet juice of papaya drying on our jaws, home to the cave, to attach ourselves back to the pulsing dome, until, hanging there, sated and sleepy, we can see what was once our world upside down as it is and wonder whose altars those are, white, encrusted with shit.

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.

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.