clear flame in air,
and over it the dark cloud, spinning, noisy, resolving
to a cloud of planes, gunning. Among them, a white core,
the single parachute. As the flier descended
the planes circled him. Vertigo of machine-guns. And his
dead body
swung, receiving bullets, sinking hooded by white
into the city.
Into the arson of the burning plane
fallen faster than flier in cage.
“That's our illness,” concluded the poet, “the war our age
must win,”
as the ship continued into pale sea, bright sea,
hurrying south,
“I know its breath on my face, have noted all its symptoms,
have heard cats shouting, seen the worn eye stare
up from the doormat, the flowerbed, under the wave,
learned all the disease of this progressive time.”
“Can it be cured?” asked the sailor. “At its root,” said the
union man,
“by reaching it.” As the ship persevered out from land.
“Reach it,”
repeated the blond, “what must we take to our breast,
what must we kiss away?”
When the coast fell at last, the passengers' wish was apparent,
they dreamed of some simple convenient city, peaceful, wired
for light.
Organization of lectures and modest entertainment.
But the audience struggled out after the second solo.
Log's entry:“Engines and instruments in good condition,
barmaid in labor, supply of fresh meat running low.
Insubordination common among the men. Fruit holding out.
Feeling against ship's orders is met with discipline.”
But at night
confusion over the course, anger, lack of sleep,
ominous quarrels over strange constellations.
Distress of tourists; they dream of housedogs, house-animals,
the 6 a.m. cry of lapdogs as the child is delivered,
crying but not hungry, refusing food, mumbling.
Dreams of distress: ape-murder, invective, the autumnal escape,
stumbling dead in the dry leaves, hunting someone, not
mentioning whom.
Dying. The barmaid's little baby's dying words
were the words with which its weekend life began:
Mother it said, enunciating distinctly,
refusing food.
They slid the two-foot coffin overboard,
a small white circle drowning in green water.
Identical sickness; but the barmaid did not speak, the crew
worked or looked up from work, waiting for shore,
worked with a mutinous hope. The poet spoke to the blond
mentioning love. She smiled when he said, “I praise the
marvel physical flowers upon your trellis skeleton, I welcome
from you, the discipline of every part.” He thought, Elaborate,
I wait for the release, the explosive distorting act
with the same fever that they wait for land;
it fills the mind
it is my port, lighthouse, coastal clew, token,
suggesting harbors, a shore-image.
The close-up in the mind, the head enlarging to fill
the sky with its immense unique idea;
Homer wrote Helen blind, the unfree are praising freedom,
I know the exquisite taste of the sight of land.
If we saw grass, it would speak, it would say ‘green,’
I dream of a boat riding on towery waves
overriding blond pebbles, grating on stone,
I have a superstition about land:
it is our wisdom,
contact and cause, without which only grows
abstinence, pestilence, unbalance.
But if a sound can travel to restore
the tight prophetic brain, but if a ringing
can travel out over electric seas:
Bells cannot ring from water, land must wait
where bells invite, strong, with their Latin chiming.
The crew looks up to the passenger rail; the poet
stands with his face into the vocal night:
Funera plango, fulgura frango, Sabbata pango,
excito lentos, dissipo ventos, paco cruentos.
“What do they ring?” shouted the sailor.
“Calling of funerals, breaking the lightning,
pealing the Sabbath,
waking the lazy, dissolving wind, peace to the evil.”
“They have power,” shouted the sailor,
“read what they mean.”
But the boat lost their plango
and on the wind frango night pango,
failing sifted over the water
until one bell repeated singular music,
only and loud.
Vox ego, ringing august,
vox ego sum vitae; voco vos.
“That hails us,” shouted the sailor,
“who is that?”
“The voice of life,” he interpreted, “calling you.”
The cheer came.
“They can hear us!” shouted the sailor.
“Lucky you know the language,” said the blond
as the hurrah went down. “What are the signals,
what do they mean?”
“God,” he said, “revelation! closing over the world,
breaking on the air, the wasted sounds among
shouts and the violent bullet in the mouth,
our age broken like stone, all grace run out of grasp,
perfected music I could never reach.
Listen!” he shouted, “triumph of bells, swinging! And for me,
bells alive also under the sea,” walking
the length of the deck, rising up tall, diving,
the arc, the avalanche.
“Insane!” the critic captain, “doesn't he
know that the sea is full of teeth?”
“Send boats out!” “You'll not reclaim that man,” said the blond,
but the crew were dropping their small boats overside.
The body was gone. The sailor whistled. The rest of the crew
dropped down their lifeboats. “Who'll make the land, they
hear us!” the sailor shouted,
“who's with us?” “Criminal fools!” threatened the captain,
and his pistol twitched the sea around them, “mutinous fools,
you'll hang or drown!” “Off your law-haunted ship! Trying
for land!”
The union man, barmaid, radio operator, child who wanted
the ground jumped—
but the blond stood crying at the rail
not daring to be saved.
“Attempt land!” shouted the sailor, “fight for something we
know!”
pulling on oars toward the origin of bells,
but the great ship was continuing, night advanced, the
captain:
“Fanatic clowns, with their contamination,
laughter and mutiny!” and into severe morning,
the crazy alcohol blue, the bloodshot afternoon.
“I wanted to go,” the blond. “Loved that suicide?” asked
the captain,
“you'll love me too, you'll have your love, only believe
their song was mad,
‘Free grace and dyin love, Free grace and dyin love
Free grace and dyin love, to ring dem charmin bells.’”
Pool money. Slaughter the polo ponies for meat. Tamper
with radio.
No sound from the world, and the water giving out.
A continent of sea: they wished formal December, blue snow,
suffering cold, but earth. And the sun came down
bare as the condor, elegant on the sea.
Mist rose, a threat of mist, ranging horizons,
the captain laughed, “Remember the landslide on Chartreuse,
and does the sea slide down on our monastics?
By God,” he
swore, “they were correct, they knew, when they mutinied!”
“Oh no,” said the blond, “oh no,” as the mist arose.
Organization of simple banking system for passengers,
but the closed bar, the empty shops, the lack of cigarettes.
Dreams of distress : land passed in the night, with no one looking,
the rising mist, the subterfuge, disaster.
Log's entry: “Engines faltering, charts useless, meat maggotty,
passengers grown flabby with lack of confidence,
great trust in me while I believed in my orders.
But lately, doubts batter me. I do not confess.
The sea is
full of teeth, full of music, and there is war at home.”
His mirror said, Order's tarnished, you drift insane.
Drift through continual waste of waters, under high heated clouds,
closing to storm-threat, guarding the ship, closing to fog,
and the passengers stared through shadow imagining
twirling cool springs, low-banked familiar flowers.
“Now,” wrote the captain, “boats of madness ferry across
the brain,
the blizzard sky's covered by fog and lost,
we'll sail by dead reckoning while the sun is covered;
saviors may rise which only can be seen
standing in mirrors.”
He looked at the tarnished heirloom giving him back his face,
no word, no savior; raw forehead, open book.
On deck they lay obscured, bodily blanketed,
the faceless travellers, streaming fog bannering
between them let them forget the dangling lifeboat hooks,
the prison days, the reach of sea, the death
around them, mutinies, wars, suicides, angers,
the ineffective rancid idle engines.
The captain saw the fog taint brightening to ochre,
“Sulphur!” he cried, “that's hell, that's yellow, the color of
madness,
we'll travel back to blue…”
tearing at his mirror, smashing it, smashing the radio,
smashing the fog
until his arms were tied.
And deep into the galleries of fog, riding in silence, ship
drifted dead. The cloud came wave on wave,
the blond woman sang to the sleeping passengers, captain
shrieked from his straitjacket : Make her go, her hair is
yellow fog.
Land, land, she sang, let them all attempt land.
Land, she sang, doubtful or dangerous. Barriers came
across her, filling up over her face.
Disaster of music in the yellow fog,
and she sang land
Drifting. Disaster. Drifted the world away
saner than angels, promise of safety, harbor.
MEDITERRANEAN
On the evening of July 25, 1936, five days after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Americans with the Anti-Fascist Olympic Games were evacuated from Barcelona at the order of the Catalonian Government. In a small Spanish boat, the Ciudad di Ibiza, which the Belgians had chartered, they and a group of five hundred, including the Hungarian and Belgian teams as well as the American, sailed overnight to Sète, the first port in France. The only men who remained were those who had volunteered in the Loyalist forces : the core of the future International Column.
1
At the end of July, exile. We watched the gangplank go
cutting the boat away, indicating : sea.
Barcelona, the sun, the fire-bright harbor, war.
Five days.
Here at the rail, foreign and refugee,
we saw the city, remembered that zero of attack,
alarm in the groves, snares through the olive hills,
rebel defeat : leaders, two regiments,
broadcasts of victory, tango, surrender.
The truckride to the city, barricades,
bricks pried at corners, rifle-shot in street,
car-burning, bombs, blank warnings, fists up, guns
busy sniping, the town walls, towers of smoke.
And order making, committees taking charge, foreigners
commanded out by boat.
I saw the city, sunwhite flew on glass,
trucewhite from window, the personal lighting found
eyes on the dock, sunset-lit faces of singers,
eyes, goodbye into exile. Saw where Columbus rides
black-pillared : discovery, turn back, explore
a new found Spain, coast-province, city-harbor.
Saw our parades ended, the last marchers on board
listed by nation.
I saw first of the faces going home into war
the brave man Otto Boch, the German exile, knowing
he quieted tourists during machine gun battle,
he kept his life straight as a single issue—
left at that dock we left, his gazing Breughel face,
square forehead and eyes, strong square breast fading,
the narrow runner's hips diminishing dark.
I see this man, dock, war, a latent image.
The boat Ciudad di Ibiza, built for 200,
loaded with 500, manned by loyal sailors,
chartered by Belgians when consulates were helpless,
through a garden of gunboats, margin of the port,
entered : Mediterranean.
2
Frontier of Europe, the tideless sea, a field of power
touching desirable coasts, rocking in time conquests,
fertile, the moving water maintains its boundaries
layer on layer, Troy—seven civilized worlds:
Egypt, Greece, Rome, jewel Jerusalem,
giant feudal Spain, giant England, this last war.
The boat pulled into evening, underglaze blue
flared instant fire, blackened towards Africa.
Over the city alternate lights occurred;
and pale
in the pale sky emerging stars.
No city now, a besieged line of lights
masking the darkness where the country lay.
But we knew guns
bright through mimosa
singe of powder
and reconnoitering plane
flying anonymous
scanning the Pyrenees
black now above the Catalonian Sea.
Boat of escape, dark on the water, hastening, safe,
holding non-combatants, the athlete, the child,
the printer, the boy from Antwerp, the black boxer,
lawyer and communist.
The Games had not been held.
A week of Games, theatre and festival;
world anti-fascist week. Pistol starts race.
Machine gun marks the war. Answered unarmed,
charged the Embarcadero, met those guns.
And charging through the province, joined that army.
Boys from the hills, the unmatched guns,
the clumsy armored cars.
Drilled in the bullring. Radio cries:
To Saragossa! And this boat.
Escape, dark on the water, an overloaded ship.
Crowded the deck. Spoke little. Down to dinner.
Quiet on the sea: no guns.
The printer said, In Paris there is time,
but where's its place now; where is poetry?
This is the sea of war; the first frontier
blank on the maps, blank sea; Minoan boats
maybe achieved this shore;
mountains whose slope divides
one race, old insurrections, Narbo, now
moves at the colored beach
destroyer wardog. “Do not burn the church,
compañeros, it is beautiful. Besides,
it brings tourists.” They smashed only the image
madness and persecution.
Exterminating wish; they forced the door,
lifted the rifle, broke the garden window,
removed only the drawings : cross and wrath.
Whenever we think of these, the poem is,
that week, the beginning, exile
remembered in continual poetry.
Voyage and exile, a midnight cold return,
dark to our left mountains begin the sky.
There, pointed the Belgian, I heard a pulse of war,
sharp guns while I ate grapes in the Pyrenees.
Alone, walking to Spain, the five o'clock of war.
In those cliffs run the sashed and sandalled men,
capture the car, arrest the priest, kill captain,
fight our war.
The poem is the fact, memory fails
under and seething lifts and will not pass.
Here is home-country, who fights our war.
Street-meeting speaker to us:
“…came for Games,
you stay for victory; foreign? your job is:
go tell your countries what you saw in Spain.”
The dark unguarded army left all night.
M. de Paîche said, “We can learn from Spain.”
The face on the dock that turned to find the war.
3
Seething, and falling back, a sea of stars,
Black marked with virile silver. Peace all night,
over that land, planes
death-lists a frantic bandage
the rubber tires burning monuments
sandbag, overturned wagon, barricade
girl's hand with gun food failing, water failing
the epidemic threat
the date in a diary a blank page opposite
no entry—
however, met
the visible enemy heroes: madness, infatuation
the cache in the crypt, the breadline shelled,
the yachtclub arsenal, the foreign cheque.
History racing from an assumed name, peace,
a time used to perfect weapons.
If we had not seen fighting,
if we had not looked there
the plane flew low
the plaster ripped by shots
the peasant's house
if we had stayed in our world
between the table and the desk
between the town and the suburb
slowly disintegration
male and female
If we had lived in our city
sixty years might not prove
the power this week
the overthrown past
tourist and refugee
Emeric in the bow speaking his life
and the night on this ship
the night over Spain
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 18
