Restored to Blue
and the famous cloud
she wiped away
with the wrong solvent…
Inadvertence, when the mind, distracted by the sun
playing in the leaves, slips, destroys the work.
As if the work were meant to stay, the days
not on a string that each night cuts, and only
memory, which fades, and other bits of matter
carrying order in their cells (give or take a broken
chain or two, a mutant moment in a copy-cat
world)—only these remain. While what we are,
the lived-in days, the irreplaceables we love,
these—like the famous cloud, though painted
by a master’s hand (long gone)—are wiped away
by solvent time, an endless surf, a changing shore.
So much for restoration’s care, the delicate brush,
restraint in the retouching, all the shoring up,
the dutifully kept files that one day soon will fill
recycle bins—such things are everyday and are
not news. So look away, or look: today the sky
is cloudless as a canvas used exclusively for blue,
and filling in the blanks seems nothing more
than a sport, a game to leave behind, a way to keep
the mind from knowing that the blanks, though
time and time filled in, return: a cloudless sky
we’re meant to read as happiness, and so we do.
Eleanor Wilner was born in 1937 in Cleveland, Ohio. She earned a BA from Goucher College and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University, where she completed her dissertation on the imagination, a work later published as Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society (1975). Wilner’s collections of poetry include Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2017 (2019), Tourist in Hell (2010), The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (2004), Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems (1997), Otherwise (1993), Sarah’s Choice (1989), Shekhinah (1984), and maya (1979). She has received numerous awards and honors for her work, including the Juniper Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation. An active educator, Wilner has taught poetry at institutions such as the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Smith College, and Warren Wilson College.
Active in civil rights and peace movements, Wilner is known for writing poetry that engages politics, culture, history, and myth. Wilner typically avoids confessional poetry that focuses on the self, preferring instead to work from what she has described as “cultural memory.” While Wilner’s work typically embraces a wide range of concerns, from Greek myth and the art of Van Gogh to bats, her book Tourist in Hell (2010) focuses on war and atrocity, exploring the brutal and brutalized history of 20th and 21st centuries.
In an essay for the Poetry Society of America, Wilner discussed “North American culture” and its poetry: “Perhaps more than any other aspect of North American culture, poetry eludes attempts at categorization and generalization,” she stated. “We are a chorus without a leader, and we pick up our themes and images from every side, and from bristling at and listening to one another. It is this eclectic imaginative miscegenation that makes our poetry so unclassifiable, so inexhaustible, and, happily, so entirely unpredictable.”
A faculty member of the Warren Wilson MFA Program, Wilner lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.