Bailing Out-A Poem for the 1970s

By Eleanor Wilner b. 1937 Eleanor Wilner

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.

Eleanor Wilner, “Bailing Out—A Poem for the 1970s” from Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1997 by Eleanor Wilner. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P. O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1998)

Biography

Eleanor Wilner was born in 1937 in 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). Active in civil rights and peace movements, Wilner is known for writing poetry that engages politics, culture, history, and myth. . . .

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