Wilner - Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems

P RINCETON S ERIES OF C ONTEMPORARY P OETS Susan Stewart, series editor For other titles in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets see P RINCETON U NIVERSITY P RESS
Princeton & Oxford Copyright 2019 by Eleanor Wilner Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965561 ISBN: 978-0-691-19332-8
ISBN (pbk.): 978-0-691-19333-5
eISBN (ebook.): 978-0-691-19412-7
Version 1.0 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Everything Is Starting, Field of Vision, What Narcissus Gave the Lake, Moon Gathering, This Straw and Manure World, Just-So Story, Found in the Free Library, The Girl with Bees in Her Hair, Be Careful What You Remember, and Dont look so scared. Youre alive! from The Girl with Bees inHer Hair. Copyright 2004 by Eleanor Rand Wilner. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. Trmmerfrauen, Middle Class Vantage, Facing into It, On Ethnic Definitions, Of a Sun She Can Remember, The Messenger, and Up Against It from Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems. Copyright 1998 by Eleanor Wilner. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Several poems originally appeared in Tourist in Hell, Otherwise, Sarahs Choice, and Shekhinah by Eleanor Wilner. The University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission. Tourist in Hell: History as Crescent Moon, Magnificat, In a Time of War, The Show Must Go On, Establishment, Saturday Night, Encounter at the Local Pub, What Loves, Takes Away, Voices from the Labyrinth: Minos, Ariadne, Daedalus, Minotaur. Otherwise: Night Fishing in the Sound, The Muse, The Bird in the Laurels Song, Rhapsody, with Rain, Being as I was, How Could I Help?,Ume: Plum, Bat Cave. Shekinah: Emigration, Without Regret, Ars Poetica, The World Is Not a Meditation, Labyrinth, In Medias Res, The Fourth David: I. Shekinah: Emigration, Without Regret, Ars Poetica, The World Is Not a Meditation, Labyrinth, In Medias Res, The Fourth David: I.

Donatello 143032: 62 1/4 II. Michelangelo 150104: 135; III. Bernini 1623: life-size; IV. Anonymous 1979, In Medias Res, Ex Libris. Editorial: Anne Savarese and Thalia Leaf Production Editorial: Ellen Foos
Text Design: Pamela L. Schnitter
Jacket/Cover Design: Pamela L.

Schnitter
Production: Merli Guerra
Publicity: Jodi Price and Keira Andrews
Copyeditor: Jodi Beder Jacket/Cover Credit: Naoya Hatakeyama, River Shadow #79, from the River Series, 2002. This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond Pro and Scala Sans To the continuing presence of CLAUDIA EMERSON (19572014) MICHELLE BOISSEAU (19552017) TONY HOAGLAND (19532018)

xi WITH thanks to the editors of the following publications in which these poems first appeared. Asheville Poetry Review: An Answering Music to Lines by Sam Hamill Birmingham Poetry Review: Intimations, Moonlit Wake, The Phoenix Reflects on Its Peculiar Situation, What the Kite Sees, and When Vision Narrows to a Single Beam of Light Fiddlehead (Canada): Gnawed Bone, Covered Bridge, In Memoriam, and The Aquarium New England Review: Shells New Ohio Review: To Think of How Cold and Underworld Poetry: Ars Poetica, 2017 Prairie Schooner: Turning Scoundrel Time (online): Elegy in Glass and Stone Spillway: For the First Time, Birds-Eye View, Close-up, a Retrospective, and Tracking The Drunken Boat (online): Blue Reflection The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review: Sowing and Writing in Sand While Walking in Walts Footprints Sowing was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2014, guest ed. Terrance Hayes; series ed. David Lehman (New York: Scribner, 2014). To Think of How Cold was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2016, guest ed.

Edward Hirsch, series ed. David Lehman (New York: Scribner, 2016). Endings, from a Verse by Gwendolyn Brooks first appeared in The Golden Shovel Anthology, ed. Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith (University of Arkansas Press, 2017). Parable of the Eyes and The Photographer on Assignment first appeared in Truth to Power: Writers Respond to the Rhetoric of Hate and Fear (Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts, 2017) Before Our Eyes and The Uses of What Is Hollow first appeared in The Eloquent Poem, ed. Elise Paschen (New York: Persea, 2019).

To the Great Dead who were my teachers; to Dr. Richard A. Mackseymy one living, irreplaceable teacher. And with unending gratitude and love to the friends poetry has brought me, especially those, gone too soon, to whom this book is dedicated; the writers of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and the GG circle of poets from Centrum; to the poets of the Cliff Notes Writing Conference, Boulder, Utah; alla mia traduttrice e sorella, Eleonora Chiavetta; to Marcia Pelletiere, my order-bringer; to Carolyn Creedon Andrews for her keen eye and invaluable help in editing and preparing this manuscript; to poet David Lee for being my found brother; to Susan Stewart, who has for so many years been a champion of these poems; to Joan Liftin, compaera; to Trudy, Mike, Noah, and Molly, the family I was given who are exactly the family I would have chosen; to Bob, my haven. In a dark time, the eye begins to see THEODORE ROETHKE

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. (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 shapea 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 escapeThoughas for that the passing there had wornthem 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