The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser
Edited by Janet E. Kaufman & Anne F. Herzog
with Jan Heller Levi
University of Pittsburgh Press
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Copyright © 2005, Muriel Rukeyser, Janet E. Kaufman, and Anne F. Herzog
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
First paperback edition, 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 0-8229-5924-0
Permissions information appears in the acknowledgments section.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8018-6 (electronic)
For Jacob, Gabriel, Casey, and Rebecca Rukeyser
Contents
Editors' Notes
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Theory of Flight (1935)
1 - Poem Out of Childhood
Poem Out of Childhood
Song for Dead Children
In a Dark House
Effort at Speech between Two People
Notes for a Poem
Place-Rituals
Tradition of This Acre
Ritual of Blessing
Wooden Spring
Sonnet
Letter, Unposted
Sand-Quarry with Moving Figures
Wedding Presents
Three Sides of a Coin
Breathing Landscape
Four in a Family
This House, This Country
2 - Theory of Flight
Preamble
The Gyroscope
The Lynchings of Jesus
1 - Passage to Godhead
2 - The Committee-Room
3 - The Trial
The Tunnel
The Structure of the Plane
1 - The Structure of the Plane
2 - The Strike
3 - The Lover
Night Flight : New York
Theory of Flight
3 - The Blood Is Justified
For Memory
Life and Works
Holy Dying
Ritual for Death
City of Monuments
Study in a Late Subway
Child and Mother
Eccentric Motion
Sundays, They Sleep Late
Thousands of Days
The Surrounded
Burlesque
Movie
Metaphor to Action
Citation for Horace Gregory
Cats and a Cock
The Blood Is Justified
U.S. 1 (1938)
1 - The Book of the Dead
The Road
West Virginia
Statement: Phillippa Allen
Gauley Bridge
The Face of the Dam: Vivian Jones
Praise of the Committee
Mearl Blankenship
Absalom
The Disease
George Robinson: Blues
Juanita Tinsley
The Doctors
The Cornfield
Arthur Peyton
Alloy
Power
The Dam
The Disease: After-Effects
The Bill
The Book of the Dead
2 - Night-Music
A Flashing Cliff
Girl at the Play
Burning Bush
Eel
Homage to Literature
The Handclap
Trophies
Panacea
In Hades, Orpheus
The Drowning Young Man
Boy with His Hair Cut Short
Course
More of a Corpse than a Woman
Three Black Women
Formosa
Night-Music
Time Exposures
The Child Asleep
Adventures, Midnight
Night-Music
Driveway
Lover as Fox
Gift-Poem
Woman and Emblems
Woman and Bird
The Birthday
Woman and Music
Outpost
3 - Two Voyages
The Cruise
Mediterranean
A Turning Wind (1939)
1 - Moment of Proof
Reading Time : 1 Minute 26 Seconds
Song, the Brain-Coral
Target Practice
Otherworld
Landing at Liverpool
The Island
Otherworld
Nuns in the Wind
For Fun
Correspondences
Democritus Laughed
Tree of Days
1/26/39
Correspondences
Noguchi
Seventh Avenue
The Shortest Way Home
Palos Verdes Cliffs
Paper Anniversary
From the Duck-Pond to the Carousel
Asylum Song
The Victims, a Play for the Home
M-Day's Child
Speech for the Assistant, from Houdini
Judith
2 - Lives
“The risen image shines, its force escapes, we are all named”
Gibbs
Ryder
Chapman
Ann Burlak
Ives
Wake Island (1942)
Beast in View (1944)
One Soldier
1 - Beast in View
Ajanta
1 - The Journey
2 - The Cave
3 - Les Tendresses Bestiales
4 - Black Blood
5 - The Broken World
Mortal Girl
Child in the Great Wood
The Meeting
The Key
Darkness Music
Song
Shooting Gallery
Suicide Blues
Wreath of Women
Madboy's Song
Drunken Girl
Love and Its Doors and Windows
The Minotaur
Gift-Poem
Holy Family
Who in One Lifetime
from “To the Unborn Child”
Leg in a Plaster Cast
Bubble of Air
Sea Mercy
Long Past Moncada
Chapultepec Park—1
Chapultepec Park—2
A Game of Ball
Gold Leaf
All Souls
Evening Plaza, San Miguel
Beast in View
2
Letter to the Front
1 - “Women and poets see the truth arrive”
2 - “Even during war, moments of delicate peace”
3 - “They called us to a change of heart”
4 - Sestina
5 - “Much later, I lie in a white seaport night”
6 - “Home thoughts from home; we read you every day”
7 - “To be a Jew in the twentieth century”
8 - “Evening, bringing me out of the government building”
9 - “Among all the waste there are the intense stories”
10 - “Surely it is time for the true grace of women”
3
The Soul and Body of John Brown
The Green Wave (1948)
“Let poems and bodies love and be given to air”
Water Night
Eyes of Night-Time
This Place in the Ways
Song, from “Mr. Amazeen on the River”
Cloud, Airs, Carried Me Away
Salamander
His Head Is Full of Faces
&nbs
p; Mrs. Walpurga
A Certain Music
The Motive of All of It
Green Limits
The Children's Orchard
Christmas Eve
Crayon House
A Charm for Cantinflas
Traditional Tune
Foghorn in Horror
Summer, the Sacramento
Speech of the Mother, from The Middle of the Air
Then I Saw What the Calling Was
Translations: Six Poems by Octavio Paz
The Bird
Poet's Epitaph
Spark
Two Bodies
The Street
Lovers
Rari from the Marquesas
Rari for Tahia and Piu
Rari for O'Otua
A True Confession
Careful of the Day
Rari for Hepuheku
Rari
Rari to Encourage Youth
Rari, to Be Bothered by Mosquitoes
Not Before I Fall Asleep
Easter Eve 1945
Easter Eve 1945
Private Life of the Sphinx
Nine Poems for the unborn child
Orpheus (1949)
Elegies (1949)
First Elegy. Rotten Lake
Second Elegy. Age of Magicians
Third Elegy. The Fear of Form
Fourth Elegy. The Refugees
Fifth Elegy. A Turning Wind
Sixth Elegy. River Elegy
Seventh Elegy. Dream-Singing Elegy
Eighth Elegy. Children's Elegy
Ninth Elegy. The Antagonists
Tenth Elegy. Elegy in Joy
Body of Waking (1958)
1
Haying Before Storm
Phaneron
The Young Girl of the Mississippi Valley
A Birth
King's Mountain
Mother Garden's Round
Rite
Ringling
After Their Quarrel
Tree
Night Feeding
The Return
Unborn Song
The Two Illuminations
F. O. M.
Exile of Music
On the Death of Her Mother
“Make and be eaten, the poet says”
Hero Speech
The Watchers
A Ballad Theme
Asleep and Awake
Of Money. And the Past.
“Long enough. Long enough”
The Loan
Pouring Milk Away
Children, the Sandbar, that Summer
Born in December
The Sixth Night: Waking
Nevertheless the Moon
Speed, We Say
The Birth of Venus
The Place at Alert Bay
Voices of Waking
Divining Water
2 - Translations: Octavio Paz
“The hand of day opens”
“At daybreak go looking for your newborn name”
Fable
Day
Proverbs
“In her splendor islanded”
“Like ivy the creeper with a thousand hands”
Life of the Poet
The Prisoner
from Sun Stone
3
Suite for Lord Timothy Dexter
1 - “They face us in sea-noon sun, just as he saw them waiting”
2 - How to Impress Massachusetts
3 - Three Nights I Dreamed
4 - Kings and Contemporaries
5 - The Pickle, the Temple
6 - The Kind of Woman
7 - Guessing Time
4
Are You Born?—1
“Murmurs from the earth of this land, from the caves and craters”
“The tree of rivers seen and forgotten”
“The power of war leads to a plan of lives”
“A tree of rivers flowing through our lives”
“The sea has opened, the limit of his dream”
Powerplant
“In the last hour of night, a zebra racing dawn”
Fields Where We Slept
Portrait of a Man, with a Background of Holdings
“A red bridge fastening this city to the forest”
“Power never dominion”
“The sky is as black as it was when you lay down”
“On your journey you will come to a time of waking”
“This is the net of begetting and belief”
Body of Waking
“Sounds of night in the country of the opposites”
Willkie in The Gulliver
“Then full awake you will recognize the voice”
“In your time, there have been those who spoke clearly”
He Had a Quality of Growth
Are You Born?—2
Waterlily Fire (1962)
The Speaking Tree
To Enter That Rhythm Where the Self Is Lost
For a Mexican Painter
A Song of Another Tribe
Song
Waterlily Fire
1 - The Burning
2 - The Island
3 - Journey Changes
4 - Fragile
5 - The Long Body
The Speed of Darkness (1968)
1 - Clues
The Poem as Mask
Orpheus
What Do I Give You?
The Transgress
The Conjugation of the Paramecium
Junk-Heap at Murano
Clues
In Our Time
Double Dialogue:
Homage to Robert Frost
The Six Canons
Forerunners
Orgy
The Overthrow of One O'Clock at Night
Among Roses
What I See
Believing in Those Inexorable Laws
Song : Love in Whose Rich Honor
Niobe Now
Song : The Star in the Nets of Heaven
Air
Gift
Cries from Chiapas
The War Comes into My Room
Delta Poems
Spirals and Fugues
Anemone
Fighting for Roses
For My Son
Poem
The Power of Suicide
The Seeming
Song from Puck Fair
Not Yet
Landscape with Wave Approaching
Segre Song
Bunk Johnson Blowing
Cannibal Bratuscha
What Have You Brought Home from the Wars?
One Month
Silence of Volcanoes
What They Said
A Little Stone in the Middle of the Road, in Florida
The Blue Flower
Woman as Market
Forgetting and Remembering
Word of Mouth
1 - The Return
2 - Word of Mouth
Endless
2 - Games
The Backside of the Academy
Mountain : One from Bryant
The Flying Red Horse
3
The Outer Banks
4 - Lives
Akiba
The Way Out
for the Song of Songs
The Bonds
Akiba Martyr
The Witness
Käthe Kollwitz
1 - “Held between wars”
2 - “Woman as gates, saying”
3 - “Held among wars, watching”
4 - Song : The Calling-Up
5 - Self-Portrait
5
The Speed of Darkness
Breaking Open (1973)
1 - Searching / Not Searching
Waking This Morning
Despisals
What Do We See?
Looking at Each Other
Desdichada
Voices
Fire
Waiting for Icarus
from City of Paradise
&
nbsp; The Question
In Her Burning
Rondel
More Clues
Myth
Searching / Not Searching
1 - “What kind of woman goes searching and searching?”
2 - Miriam : The Red Sea
3 - For Dolci
4 - Concrete
5 - Brecht's Galileo
6 - Reading the Kieu
7 - The Floor of Ocean
8 - H. F. D.
9 - The Artist as Social Critic
10 - The President and the Laser Bomb
11 - Not Searching
12 - The Question
13 - “Searching/not searching. To make closeness”
14 - “What did I see? What did I not see?”
A Simple Experiment
Along History
Boys of These Men Full Speed
All the Little Animals
Next
Two Years
Iris
2 - Orange and Grape
Ballad of Orange and Grape
Rock Flow, River Mix
Martin Luther King, Malcolm X
Looking
Don Baty, the Draft Resister
Te Hanh : Long-Ago Garden
Welcome from War
Facing Sentencing
Secrets of American Civilization
Wherever
Bringing
A Louis Sonnet
After Melville
The Writer
Gradus Ad Parnassum
From a Play : Publisher's Song
In the Night the Sound Woke Us
In the Underworld
Afterwards
Flying to Hanoi
It Is There
The Running of the Grunion
Sacred Lake
3 - Northern Poems
Songs of the Barren Grounds
1 - The Old Days
2 - Inland, Away
3 - I'm Here Again
4 - Not Much Good
5 - My Breath
I Recognize This Song
The Black Ones, the Great Ones
Trout Fishing
How Lovely It Is
The Word-Fisher
Stroking Songs
A Girl for a Boy—Stroking Song
The Baby on the Mountain—Stroking Song
The Wiping Moss from the Ruins
Stroking Songs, Childhood Songs
Being Born
Shooting Star
4
Breaking Open
Columbus
Burning the Dreams
Death and the Dancer
Rational Man
The Hostages
The Gates (1976)
1
St. Roach
Dream-Drumming
Double Ode
Painters
Rune
How We Did It
Islands
Blue Spruce
Artifact
Ms. Lot
Boys in the Branches
Song : Lying in Daylight
Hypnogogic Figure
The Lost Romans
Canal
For Kay Boyle
Resurrection of the Right Side
The Wards
The Sun-Artist
Poem White Page White Page Poem
Fable
Neruda, the Wine
Before Danger
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 1
