Eleanor Wilner

 It was a pure white cloud that hung there
in the blue, or a jellyfish on a waveless
sea, suspended high above us; we were
the creatures in the weeds below.

It seemed so effortless in its suspense, 
perfectly out of time and out of place
like the ghost of moon in the sky
of a brilliant afternoon.

After a while it seemed to grow, and we
inferred that it was moving, drifting down—
though it seemed weightless, motionless,
one of those things that defy
the ususal forces—gravity, and wind
and the almost imperceptible
pressure of the years.
 But it was coming
down.

 The blur of its outline slowly cleared:
it was scalloped at the lower edge, like a shell
or a child's drawing of a flower, detached
and floating, beauty simplified.
 That's when
we saw it had a man attached, suspended
from the center of the flower, a kind of human
stamen or a stem.
 We thought it was
a god, or heavenly seed, sent
to germinate the earth
with a gentler, nobler breed.
 It might be
someone with sunlit eyes and mind of dawn.

We thought of falling to our knees.


So you can guess 
the way we might have felt
when it landed in our field
with the hard thud of solid flesh
and the terrible flutter of the collapsing
lung of silk.
 He smelled of old sweat, his
uniform was torn, and he was tangled
in the ropes, hopelessly harnessed
to the white mirage that brought him down.

He had a wound in his chest, a red
flower that took its color from his heart.


We buried him that very day, just as he came
to us, in a uniform of soft brown
with an eagle embroidered on the sleeve,
its body made of careful gray stitches,
its eye a knot of gold.
 The motto
underneath had almost worn away.
 For days,
watching from our caves, we saw
the huge white shape of silk shifting
in the weeds, like a pale moon
when the wind filled it, stranded, 
searching in the aimless way
of unmoored things
for whatever human ballast gave 
direction to their endless drift.

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