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What Loves, Takes Away If the nose of the pig in the market of Firenze has lost its matte patina, and shines, brassy, even in the half light; if the mosaic saint on the tiles of the Basilica floor is half gone, worn by the gravity of solid soles, the passing of piety; if the arms of Venus have reentered the rubble, taken by time, her perennial lover, mutilating even the memory of beauty; and if the mother, hiding with her child from the death squads of brutality, if she, trying to keep the child quiet, to keep them from being found out, holds her hand over his mouth, holds him against her, tighter and tighter, until he stops breathing; if the restorer—trying to bring back to perfection the masterpiece scarred by its transit through time, wipes away by mistake, the mysterious smile ... if what loves, and love is, takes away what it aims to preserve, then here is the place to fall silent, meaning well but in danger of marring what we would praise, unable to do more than wear down the marble steps to the altar, smother the fire we would keep from the wind's extinction, or if, afraid of our fear, we lift the lid from the embers, and send abroad, into the parched night, a flight of sparks, incendiary, dying to catch somewhere, hungry for fuel, the past, its dry provision tinder for brilliance and heat, prelude to cold, and to ash ...
Eleanor Wilner
One of the most vital and original voices in American poetry, Eleanor Wilner writes from what Poetry terms a “mythical impulse,” her “imaginative energy directed outward, rather than inward, toward the world, rather than the self.”
Eleanor Wilner, born in Ohio in 1937, is the author of six books of poetry, including the most recent, The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon, 2004) and Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 1998). Her work appears in many anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Poetry 1996 and Best Poems of 1990 (Collier/ Macmillan). She has won a MacArthur Award, the Juniper Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
poetic tools: 1. Literary Allusion = '' if tyhe arms of Venus have reentered the rubble '' 2. Paradox = '' What Loves, Takes Away '' 3. Symbolism = something concrete used to represent something abstract. 4.Alliteration / Repition = '' and if, if what, of if, if ... '' 5. Stanza = group of consecutive lines in a poem that form a single unit ; otherwise known as a paragraph of poetry.
Mother sacrifices own life for her son
