Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  In the museum life, centuries of ambition

  yielded at last a fertilizing image:

  the Carthaginian stone meaning a tall woman

  carries in her two hands the book and cradled dove,

  on her two thighs, wings folded from the waist

  cross to her feet, a pointed human crown.

  This valley is given to us like a glory.

  To friends in the old world, and their lifting hands

  that call for intercession. Blow falling full in face.

  All those whose childhood made learn skill to meet,

  and art to see after the change of heart;

  all the belligerents who know the world.

  You standing over gorges, surveyors and planners,

  you workers and hope of countries, first among powers;

  you who give peace and bodily repose,

  opening landscapes by grace, giving the marvel lowlands

  physical peace, flooding old battlefields

  with general brilliance, who best love your lives;

  and you young, you who finishing the poem

  wish new perfection and begin to make;

  you men of fact, measure our times again.

  These are our strength, who strike against history.

  These whose corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness

  to our diseases;

  these carrying light for safety on their foreheads

  descended deeper for richer faults of ore,

  drilling their death.

  These touching radium and the luminous poison,

  carried their death on their lips and with their warning

  glow in their graves.

  These weave and their eyes water and rust away,

  these stand at wheels until their brains corrode,

  these farm and starve,

  all these men cry their doom across the world,

  meeting avoidable death, fight against madness,

  find every war.

  Are known as strikers, soldiers, pioneers,

  fight on all new frontiers, are set in solid

  lines of defense.

  Defense is sight; widen the lens and see

  standing over the land myths of identity,

  new signals, processes:

  Alloys begin : certain dominant metals.

  Deliberate combines add new qualities,

  sums of new uses.

  Over the country, from islands of Maine fading,

  Cape Sable fading south into the orange

  detail of sunset,

  new processes, new signals, new possession.

  A name for all the conquests, prediction of victory

  deep in these powers.

  Carry abroad the urgent need, the scene,

  to photograph and to extend the voice,

  to speak this meaning.

  Voices to speak to us directly. As we move.

  As we enrich, growing in larger motion,

  this word, this power.

  Down coasts of taken countries, mastery,

  discovery at one hand, and at the other

  frontiers and forests,

  fanatic cruel legend at our back and

  speeding ahead the red and open west,

  and this our region,

  desire, field, beginning. Name and road,

  communication to these many men,

  as epilogue, seeds of unending love.

  2 Night-Music

  A FLASHING CLIFF

  Spinning on his heel, the traveller

  sees across snow a flashing cliff.

  Past the plain's freeze, past savage branches

  immune in ice, a frozen waterfall,

  clamped in December, glistens alive.

  Love, will you recognize yourself displayed?

  Or is the age defective, cold with storm

  to lock fast water in iron artifice,

  whitening cataracts?—contempt and loss,

  and nothing, in the great world, can lie calm,

  travel alive, but is frozen solid,

  and will not face its mirror nor speak its pain.

  Will you fight winter to break in immense speed

  resisting and sensitive, a waterfall–flash

  sparkling full across the vicious plain?

  Fight down our age, the mad vindictive time?

  No victory's here. Now, any passion suffers

  against proud ice, flashing, angry, and jailed.

  You, maniac, catalept!

  And, love. You are all rivers.

  GIRL AT THE PLAY

  Long after you beat down the powerful hand

  and leave the scene, prison's still there to break.

  Brutalized by escape, you travel out to sit

  in empty theatres, your stunned breast, hardened neck

  waiting for warmth to venture back.

  Gilded above the stage, staring archaic shapes

  hang, like those men you learn submission from

  whose majesty sits yellow on the night,

  young indolent girls, long-handed, one's vague mouth

  and cruel nose and jaw and throat.

  Waiting's paralysis strikes, king-cobra hooded head's

  infected fangs petrify body and face.

  Emblems fade everyway, dissolving even

  the bitter infantile boys who call for sleep's

  winy breasts whose nipples are long grapes.

  Seats fill. The curtain's up where strong lights act,

  cut theatre to its theme; the quick fit's past.

  Here's answer in masses moving; by light elect,

  they turn the stage before into the street behind;

  and nothing's so forgotten as your blind

  female paralysis that takes the mind,

  and nothing's so forgotten as your dead

  fever, now that it's past and the swift play's ahead.

  BURNING BUSH

  Faced with furnace demands during its education,

  the strictest spirit must take them all; it needs

  to break down shame; but gasping into a pillow

  later to nobody anywhere, claims I Love You.

  It plays long tricks

  upon itself—the stealthy girl locks doors,

  the woman listens in single high rooms for music,

  hears climbing elevators as the picket walks

  in a dead street before tallest skyscrapers

  far on the sidewalks;

  all horrors enter all beds to purify

  the critical spirit in a city of change,

  twisted in flames, blazing among the secrets,

  breaking the taut life with their harsh I Have You.

  It burns and never speaks

  only is educated, when it assumes bright horror,

  nourished against the time it hears its name—

  until it is called will stand, witness to fire,

  training a flame upward along its vine.

  EEL

  We started to walk but it was wading-slow.

  Ran to the corner and boarded at the carstop,

  impatient through the city, hating the noise of iron.

  Shut it out of the head

  until the city, quiet, goes submarine

  and we are winding through, defended, winding, with

  weird deepseas, the famous world, swimming, facing our youth.

  Their faces royal in pain, useless children advance

  down avenues shining a stormy cobalt sky.

  The lights go green. They stare. Stop riding, cross the street,

  here are rich avenues, a city's alibi,

  here's your prophetic love and object lesson:

  Shops will instruct you what to want.

  Strangers will serve you, floorwalkers.

  Condition : don't notice their disease.

  be easy-going, and so, susceptible.

  These to cultivate, perhaps have:

  flippant defeat, good sportsmansh
ip,

  the miracle figure of the football-player:

  a perfect husband, a promised income.

  We were too earnest. We had to lose.

  We wound past armies of strangers, waving love's

  thin awkward plant among a crowd of salesmen.

  “Sold the salesmen? Been loved, loving? You, too young?”

  We stared at policemen, hypnotized by force,

  holding the ball during games, forgetting to throw,

  as they padlocked the bar, clapped boards across the door,

  padlocked the union hall. Deported. Shut.

  Winding through avenues, stone blocked our eyes,

  we dreamed raw yellow hills of mustard-flower.

  Mind's tropic scenery was farmed : Come back to stay,

  return to the broken man across the subway,

  read crinkled Atlantics, tabloid skies—your feet

  slap stone; this is you, advancing down a street,

  your ancestors being dead, your parents busy somewhere.

  You have a class. You have your object lessons.

  Radio City, largest of riches, leaning

  against the flaming cobalt, fatal as Belgium,

  flowers in neon on the winter air,

  All its theatres open padded lobbies

  all its windows run light

  And adolescent breasts, alert for terror,

  fingers ophelian white and quick with fear

  flower aware, and the staring workman

  walks down expensive streets. And all the adolescents,

  winding, and submarine, waking, with sleep shaken

  go weaving among the crowds; growing remember

  Alexander, peacock of Macedon, Euclid building his circles

  on the flat Greek sand,

  the violent empresses, Boone breaking through green country—

  in the papers, Ann Burlak makes women pound kettles

  for drums, for a loud band!

  Miss Swan, the Latin teacher, hand laid on moulding,

  speaks Cicero admirably, for massy syllables, hearing the

  pompous Senate heave; we fidget until the hour—

  we compare lipsticks, smudging our palms with red.

  Know Rome is elsewhere and the street's outside.

  And fast thoughts run like fire as the roads divide.

  The adolescents, walking, at school, going through streets,

  stop wavering, heal their minds snapped during mutiny.

  Believing at first in easy cures, the floundering blood to

  be healed by love,

  not yet knowing that thousands walk straightforward, wish

  the same,

  young, and winding through cities, young, seeing time's disease.

  Parading upon a stage lit with immense firm flame.

  To change it. To mature. To find. To be these.

  HOMAGE TO LITERATURE

  When you imagine trumpet-faced musicians

  blowing again inimitable jazz

  no art can accuse nor cannonadings hurt,

  or coming out of your dreams of dirigibles

  again see the unreasonable cripple

  throwing his crutch headlong as the headlights

  streak down the torn street, as the three hammerers

  go One, Two, Three on the stake, triphammer poundings

  and not a sign of new worlds to still the heart;

  then stare into the lake of sunset as it runs

  boiling, over the west past all control

  rolling and swamps the heartbeat and repeats

  sea beyond sea after unbearable suns;

  think : poems fixed this landscape : Blake, Donne, Keats.

  THE HANDCLAP

  The body cannot lie, but its betrayals,

  narrower actions, cross even frontiers of night,

  and your most delicate treason falls in a quick stroke,

  undercuts sleep.

  Now, if I bodily sometime betrayed myself,

  the foolish play's curtain drops on your active exposure,

  grotesque as a peepshow, definite as the axe

  in instant effect.

  The toppling high tree lets fall its heavy side

  green on the air, goes anyway down to ground

  after a clap of weight resting—but we descend to

  imperfect peace.

  Here's war!—body betrayed, but all nerves still exerted

  to rise up whole, grasp the perpetual sun.

  Echo the shock, handclaps of fact composing

  a blackest pattern,

  a tyrant pace to dance, clatter of anger

  spanking the fury up to publish treason,

  ranting and clapping madness; while the dim

  blood groans forever love.

  TROPHIES

  The choice proposed : ascends, the nervy conductor

  facing the strings as the stage shakes, as the plane

  looms in the loud air, motor cut out,

  and the musicians' black alters to violin-brown.

  They lift their instruments. The choice.

  Mr. Sceptre, the elegant instructor,

  looks about the classroom sighing Keats,

  emotion in torrents on adolescent cheeks

  as teargas tranquilly saturates the college.

  Choose: the workers will rise, or your heroes, tall as stone,

  must face the fascist cruelties of pain.

  Trapped in the valley—historian eloquence

  reminds us of recurrent Civil War:

  “To prevent repetition of this attack of the enemy

  I directed Captain Gaw, chief topographer,

  to reach the commanding officer of the other wing.”

  “Obtained abundance of corn, molasses, and sweet potatoes.”

  “The advance was then gallantly resumed, the enemy

  driven from their guns, the heights handsomely carried.”

  But the choice is proposed: the active alternative,

  people's Party in the streets, last year's heroes at home.

  Who will take choice, demands the scientist

  (the smiling friend sitting beside his mind),

  now that the key is grincing in the lock?

  Now that the sea has bitten on the ship

  and bent it to the rock?

  Here are insignia of reversed cities,

  victorious slogans and the acts of war.

  And we shall never know their poise again,

  though we remember what we were,

  now that our officers are no longer

  in full golden summer regalia,

  and we no longer well-dressed watchers

  at the march-past and the fly-by—

  or even attentive before the fire

  haunted by certain safe compelling shoulders,

  a trick of the head, lust of incautious eye;

  fortified by the braver faces

  of picket-line and commemorative parade,

  the anniversary demonstration—

  we cast about for love, lost between wars,

  alone in the room and every street-light out.

  Who's to rise to it, now that ruin's made,

  now that we're petrified in the pale looking-glass,

  our glossy scars, our books, our loss,

  caught in the narrowest final pass?

  And all our heroes are afraid.

  PANACEA

  Make me well, I said.—And the delighted touch.

  You put dead sweet hand on my dead brain.

  The window cleared and the night-street stood black.

  As soon as I left your house others besieged me

  forcing my motion, saying, Make me well.

  Took sickness into the immense street,

  but nothing was thriving I saw blank light the crazy

  blink of torture the lack and there is no

  personal sickness strong to intrude there.

  Returned. Stood at the window. Make me well.

>   Cannot? The white sea, which is inviolable,

  is no greater, the disallied world's unable,

  daylight horizons of lakes cannot caress me well.

  The hypocrite leper in the parable,

  did he believe would be kissed whole by kisses?

  I'll try beyond you now. I'll try all flame.

  Some force must be whole, some eye inviolable—

  look, here I am returned! No help. Gone high again;

  legend's no precedent. This perseveres.

  The sun, I say, sincere, the sun, the sun.

  IN HADES, ORPHEUS

  “Look!” he said, “all green!” but she,

  leaning against him at her hospital door,

  received it on her eyes as fireline blinding bright

  and would not see.

  “Come into the park!” he offered her,

  but she was feverstruck still, brimful of white

  monotonous weakness, and could not face the grass

  and the bright water.

  A boy skating upstreet

  shouted; the gardener climbed at the doorway, pruning,

  and the gay branches dropped where she stood, fearful

  of her quick heartbeat

  released, fearing the kiss

  of vivid blood. The husband straightened in the sun,

  risking their staggered histories against the violent

  avenue's emphasis;

  “A long pain, long fever!”

  He faced her full for the first time, speaking,

  turned with his hand her face to meet his mouth,

  “but that death's over.”

  Lights out; noon falls

  steeply away, blazing in green; he sees the sharp fear pass

  verdict upon her, pitching and frothing toward the

  mechanical white walls.

  THE DROWNING YOUNG MAN

  The drowning young man lifted his face from the river

  to me, exhausted from calling for help and weeping;

  “My love!” I said; but he kissed me once for ever

  and returned to his privacy and secret keeping.

  His close face dripped with the attractive water,

  I stared in his eyes and saw there penalty,

  for the city moved in its struggle, loud about us,

  and the salt air blew down; but he would face the sea.

  “Afraid, afraid, my love?” But he will never speak,

  looking demands for rest, watching the wave come up,

  too timid to turn, too loving to cry out,

  lying face down in tide, biting his nervous lip.