Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  in valvular air, each person in the street

  conceived surrounded by his life and pain,

  fixed against time, subtly by these impaled :

  death and that shapeless war. Listening at dead doors,

  our youth assumes a thousand differing flesh

  summoning fact from abandoned machines of trade,

  knocking on the wall of the nailed-up power-plant,

  telephoning hello, the deserted factory, ready

  for the affirmative clap of truth

  ricochetting from thought to thought among

  the childhood, the gestures, the rigid travellers.

  SONG FOR DEAD CHILDREN

  We set great wreaths of brightness on the graves of the passionate

  who required tribute of hot July flowers :

  for you, O brittle-hearted, we bring offering

  remembering how your wrists were thin and your delicate bones

  not yet braced for conquering.

  The sharp cries of ghost-boys are keen above the meadows,

  the little girls continue graceful and wondering;

  flickering evening on the lakes recalls those young

  heirs whose developing years have sunk to earth

  their strength not tested, their praise unsung.

  Weave grasses for their childhood : who will never see

  love or disaster or take sides against decay

  balancing the choices of maturity;

  silent and coffin'd in silence while we pass

  loud in defiance of death, the helpless lie.

  IN A DARK HOUSE

  Two on the stairs in a house where they had loved :

  mounting, and the steps a long ascent before them

  brown: a single step creaking high in the flight; the turn :

  the quiet house and the cheese-yellow walls shadowed by night,

  dark; and the unlit lamps along the wall.

  Dusk piles in old house-corners rapidly. Shade grows

  where corners round to flights of stairs again. Evening

  accumulates under the treads of mounting stairs.

  They rise: he tightly-knit, clenched in anxiety, she calm,

  massive in female beauty, precise line of brow

  curving to generous cheek and mouth and throat,

  and his face bright and strained with eagerness.

  But the nights are restless with these dreams of ours

  in which we cry, fling our arms abroad, and there is no one;

  walls close in to a shaft and blur of brown:

  out of the chaos and eclipse of mind rise stairs.

  (Here, metrically and monotonously walks

  each several person unprotectedly.)

  Alone, the nightmare broadens in the rising,

  dull step sinking behind dull step, now, here, here,

  nothing in the world but the slow spiral rise, expectancy, and fear.

  He turns his face to her, walk unbroken. Her face

  questioning turns: there is no help for each

  in the other. There are no eyes on them. The shaft

  is empty of voices, all but the creaking step, regularly

  in the flights recurring, preknown, dreaded that sound.

  There is no face that he can see but hers.

  She knows his look, and has known it for a long time.

  The creak of the one step is a punctuating rhyme.

  But the nights are restless with receding faces

  in massed battalions through the solemn air,

  vivid with brightness, clangorous with sounds:

  struck copper, chiming cylinders of silver, horns :

  presences in the outer air. But here

  only the empty shaft and the painful stairs.

  He remembers the men and women he has loved:

  fine-curved and brittle skulls housing strange ardency,

  the male hard bravery of argument :

  lips of women, love-writhen, and their hands,

  pale fruit of comfort, pliant, governing, white consolation

  against small fear and human bodily pain,

  never against the terror of the stairs.

  Remembrances of words, human counsel in sounds, and pictures,

  books, and the bleak rush of shining towers,

  tunes crop through the tired brain: Ravel's “Bolero,”

  an old blues going “Love, Oh Love, Oh Loveless Love,”

  humping through air powerfully with its sound.

  She remembers the men and women she has loved:

  the full soft cheeks of girls, their secrecies,

  grave words that fell with sweet continuance in her youth :

  men's eyes, dumb with meaning unspeakable and low-sounding

  among the intricate memories deep in her recessed mind,

  the length of their arms, the firm triangled backs, stalwart,

  turning beautifully in their planes on the narrow hips,

  dark ease beneath their arms and eyes, strength in their voices,

  but ebbing away in the silence of the stairs.

  Remembrances of wind shaking November evenings,

  arpeggioed skyscrapers, clean-heavy-falling waters :

  “There's No Today, There's No Tomorrow”

  debates against a symphony of Brahms',

  and foot follows foot heavily in the row.

  He had gone to play apart, by the hollows of the sand

  cupped (a pale arm about the ocean's blue) :

  picked pebbles and the soft-voluted shells,

  laver and dulse, dark flowers of the sea.

  He had been a child in a fantastic wood

  where the dim statues stood, posturing gothically,

  and “Mother, mother, mother!” cried : but they

  remained with closed lips ceremonially.

  The ocean and his mother and his childhood let him be

  until he had grown and finished his lessons and his prayers,

  and then : these stairs.

  Night is treacherous with dreams betraying us,

  leaving us vulnerable to inherited shame,

  crying out against our secret, naming an occult name.

  And she had enjoyed narrow fields, shaven lawns,

  tiny stones freckled brown and white and red,

  green water troubled by waves of a twig's making,

  grown out of these to wider thoughts that bred

  high spaces and new knowledges, and cared for some

  with mind and body, some with love only of eyes and head.

  She had believed in the quick response to pain,

  in union of crowds living in one belief,

  a social order kept by a coöperative strain

  steadily toward one thing, but aware of all :

  she had reached out her hand with the gesture of one who dares,

  and found : these stairs.

  The stairs still rise. The halls remain, and dull

  and somber stand to be trodden by the quiet two rising

  laboriously along the fateful road. They should be high now.

  (If the dun walls should slide into the night,

  faces might be disclosed, bitter, impotent, angered

  above slant shoulders swinging toolless arms, great hands

  jointed around no implements, and the silent mouths

  opened to cry for law. Some faces black, the rope

  knotted beneath an ear, some black with the strong blood

  of Negroes, some yellow and concentrate, all fixed

  on the tower of stairs, should the walls sink, perhaps

  all waiting, perhaps nothing but unanswering dark.)

  They must be high. There are no voices. The shaft is very still.

  Night is sick with our dreams. Night is florid

  with our by-reason-uncontested imagings. We in our time

  (not we : you : in your time : no credit ours)

  have built brave stone on stone, and called their blazon
ry

  Beauty Old Yet Ever New : Eternal Voice

  And Inward Word : (a blur of fond noises signifying

  a long thing) and raised signs, saying:

  But Of All Things Truth Beareth Away

  The Victory : (the pock-bitten pass to spit

  gelatinously and obscenely on the bird-marked stones,

  and shallow-carven letters fade). The evil night

  of our schooled minds is morbid with our dreams.

  Whir. Whirl of brown stairs. Cool brow. Athenian lips.

  The creaking stairs. Stupid stupid stupidly stupidly

  we go a long voyage on the stairs of a house

  builded on stairs. One stair creaks forever amen in the Name.

  Treads rock under the feet. The two go : he tight and harsh

  (but limp with warm exhaustion), she plods : one, two, foot : on

  up mounting up O lovely stairs, hideous and cruel

  we propitiate you with incensuous words stairs lovely loved

  rise, idol of our walking days and nights,

  travelled-forever road of the lordly mind : with shaking bannisters

  and no sound crawling through the wall-hole-lips :

  love-writhen women's lips : the crackled lips of the mass

  that must be there waiting for law at the wall's decay.

  Large female : male : come tiredness and sleep

  come peace come generous power over no other, come Order here.

  Steps mount. The brown treads rise. Stairs. Rise up. Stairs.

  EFFORT AT SPEECH BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE

  : Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?

  I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing.

  When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit

  who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair :

  a pink rabbit : it was my birthday, and a candle

  burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy.

  : Oh, grow to know me. I am not happy. I will be open:

  Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music,

  like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me.

  There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.

  : Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?

  When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,

  fluid : and my widowed aunt played Chopin,

  and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.

  I want now to be close to you. I would

  link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days.

  : I am not happy. I will be open.

  I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems.

  There has been fear in my life. Sometimes I speculate

  On what a tragedy his life was, really.

  : Take my hand. Fist my mind in your hand. What are you now?

  When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,

  and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death :

  if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty,

  if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt.

  I am unhappy. I am lonely. Speak to me.

  : I will be open. I think he never loved me:

  he loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam

  that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:

  he said with a gay mouth: I love you. Grow to know me.

  : What are you now? If we could touch one another,

  if these our separate entities could come to grips,

  clenched like a Chinese puzzle…yesterday

  I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,

  and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.

  Everyone silent, moving…. Take my hand. Speak to me.

  NOTES FOR A POEM

  Here are the long fields inviolate of thought,

  here are the planted fields raking the sky,

  signs in the earth :

  water-cast shuttles of light flickering the underside of rock.

  These have been shown before; but the fields know new hands,

  the son's fingers grasp warmly at the father's hoe ;

  there will be new ways of seeing these ancestral lands.

  “In town, the munitions plant has been poor since the war,

  And nothing but a war will make it rich again.”

  Holy, holy, holy, sings the church next door.

  Time-ridden, a man strides the current of a stream's flowing,

  stands, flexing the wand curvingly over his head,

  tracking the water's prism with the flung line.

  Summer becomes productive and mature.

  Farmers watch tools like spikes of doom against the sure

  condemning sky descending upon the hollow lands.

  The water is ridged in muscles on the rock,

  force for the State is planted in the stream-bed.

  Water springs from the stone — the State is fed.

  Morning comes, brisk with light,

  a broom of color over the threshold.

  Long flights of shadows escape to the white sky :

  a spoon is straightened. Day grows. The sky is blued.

  The water rushes over the shelves of stone

  to anti-climax on the mills below the drop.

  The planted fields are bright and rake the sky.

  Power is common. Earth is grown

  and overgrown in unrelated strength, the moral

  rehearsed already, often.

  (There must be the gearing of these facts

  into coördination, in a poem or numbers,

  rows of statistics, or the cool iambs.)

  The locked relationships which will be found

  are a design to build these factual timbers—

  a plough of thought to break this stubborn ground.

  PLACE-RITUALS

  TRADITION OF THIS ACRE

  This is the word our lips caress, our teeth bite

  on the pale spongy fruit of this, the name :

  mouthing the story, cowlike in dignity, and spitting it

  in the tarnished cuspidor of present days.

  And if there were radium in Plymouth Rock, they would not strike it

  (bruising the fair stone), nor gawk at Semiramis on Main Street

  nor measure the gentle Christ in terms of horse-power.

  Cracked bells are severally struck at noon.

  The furrow of their ways will cradle us all.

  Amen, amen, to the ritual of our habit, fall

  before the repetitions in the lips of doom.

  RITUAL OF BLESSING

  The proud colors and brittle cloths, the supple smoke rising,

  the metal symbols precious to our dreams

  loftily borne. Thy Kingdom come.

  We have blessed the fields with speech.

  There are alp-passes in the travelled mind

  (they have stood in the quiet air, making signs on the sky

  to bless the cities of the shining plain).

  The climate of the mind is the warmth of a shrine

  and the air torn with incense. World without end.

  How can we bless this place : by the sweet horns,

  the vaulted words, the pastoral lovers in the waist-deep grass,

  remembrances linking back, hands raised like strict flames pointing,

  the feet of priests tracking the smooth earth,

  many hands binding corn : ? Thy Kingdom come.

  There are pale steeples erect among the green,

  blood falling before the eyes of love the lids fire-bright,

  hands together in the fields, the born and unborn children,

  and the wish for new blessing and the given blessing blend,

  a glory clear in the man-tracks, in the blind

  seeking for warmth in the climates of the mind.

  World without end.

  Amen.

&n
bsp; WOODEN SPRING

  How horrible late spring is, with the full death of the frozen tight bulbs

  brownly rotting in earth; and each chord of light

  rayed into slivers, a bunch of grapes plucked grape by grape apart,

  a warm chord broken into the chilled single notes.

  (Let us rely on cerebral titillation

  for the red stimulus of sensuous supply;)

  here is no heat, no fierce color: spring is no bacchante this year

  eager to celebrate her carnal dedication.

  The ghosts swim, lipless, eyeless, upward :

  the crazy hands point in five directions down :

  to the sea, the high ridge, the bush, the blade, the weak white root :

  thumping at life in an agony of birth, abortive fruit.

  Spring is very mad for greenness now

  ( : suppose it would be beautiful, if we let ourselves be : ),

  but we must strip nascent earth bare of green mystery.

  Trees do not grow high as skyscrapers in my town,

  and flowers not so lovely as the pale bewildered youth,

  hands pointing in five directions upward and out;

  and spring in the fields and cities spreads to the north and south,

  and is comforted in desire for the sun's mouth.

  Earth does not seem wooden to the comforted spring :

  (spring could not seem so dull, I comforted :

  but there must be abstraction, where fields need not sprout, waves pound,

  there must be silence where no rushing grasses sound,

  life in this lack of death, comfort on this wide ground).

  SONNET

  My thoughts through yours refracted into speech

  transmute this room musically tonight,

  the notes of contact flowing, rhythmic, bright

  with an informal art beyond my single reach.

  Outside, dark birds fly in a greening time :

  wings of our sistered wishes beat these walls :

  and words afflict our minds in near footfalls

  approaching with a latening hour's chime.

  And if an essential thing has flown between us,

  rare intellectual bird of communication,

  let us seize it quickly : let our preference

  choose it instead of softer things to screen us

  each from the other's self : muteness or hesitation,

  nor petrify live miracle by our indifference.

  LETTER, UNPOSTED

  “My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?”