quick recognition
male and female
And the war in peace, the war in war, the peace,
the faces on the dock
the faces in those hills.
4
Near the end now, morning. Sleepers cover the decks,
cabins full, corridors full of sleep. But the light
vitreous, crosses water; analyzed darkness,
crosshatched in silver, passes up the shore,
touching limestone massif, deserted tableland,
bends with the down-warp of the coastal plain.
The colored sun stands on the route to Spain,
builds on the waves a series of mirrors
and on the scorched land rises hot.
Coasts change their names as the boat goes to
France, Costa Brava softens to Côte Vermeil,
Spain's a horizon ghost behind the shapeless sea.
Blue praising black, a wind above the waves
moves pursuing a jewel, this hieroglyph
boat passing under the sun to lose it on the
attractive sea, habitable and kind.
A barber sun, razing three races, met
from the north with a neurotic eagerness.
They rush to solar attraction; local daybreak finds
them on the red earth of the colored cliffs; the little islands
tempt worshippers, gulf-purple, pointed bay.
We crowd the deck,
welcome the islands with a sense of loss.
5
The wheel in the water, green, behind my head.
Turns with its light-spokes. Deep. And the drowning eyes
find under the water figures near
in their true picture, moving true,
the picture of that war enlarging clarified
as the boat perseveres away, always enlarging,
becoming clear.
Boat of escape, your water-photograph.
I see this man, dock, war, a latent image.
And at my back speaking the black boxer,
telling his education : porter, fighter, no school,
no travel but this, trade-union sent a team.
I saw Europe break apart
and artifice or martyr's will
cannot anneal this war, nor make
the loud triumphant future start
shouting from its tragic heart.
Deep in the water Spanish shadows turn,
assume their brightness past a cruel lens,
quick vision of loss. The pastoral lighting takes
the boat, deck, passengers, the pumice cliffs,
the winedark sweatshirt at my shoulder.
Cover away the fighting cities
but still your death-afflicted eyes
must hold the print of flowering guns,
bombs whose insanity craves size,
the lethal breath, the iron prize.
The clouds upon the water-barrier pass,
the boat may turn to land; the shapes endure,
rise up into our eyes, to bind
us back; an accident of time
set it upon us, exile burns it in.
Once the fanatic image shown,
enemy to enemy,
past and historic peace wear thin;
we see Europe break like stone,
hypocrite sovereignties go down
before this war the age must win.
6
The sea produced that town : Sète, which the boat turns to,
at peace. Its breakwater, casino, vermouth factory, beach.
They searched us for weapons. No currency went out.
The sign of war had been search for cameras,
pesetas and photographs go back to Spain,
the money for the army. Otto is fighting now, the lawyer said.
No highlight hero. Love's not a trick of light.
But. The town lay outside, peace, France.
And in the harbor the Russian boat Schachter;
sharp paint-smell, the bruise-colored shadow swung,
sailors with fists up, greeting us, asking news,
making the harbor real.
Barcelona.
Slow-motion splash. Anchor. Small from the beach
the boy paddles to meet us, legs hidden in canoe,
curve of his blade that drips.
Now gangplank falls to deck.
Barcelona
everywhere, Spain everywhere, the cry of Planes for Spain.
The picture at our eyes, past memory, poem,
to carry and spread and daily justify.
The single issue, the live man standing tall,
on the hill, the dock, the city, all the war.
Exile and refugee, we land, we take
nothing negotiable out of the new world;
we believe, we remember, we saw.
Mediterranean gave
image and peace, tideless for memory.
For that beginning
make of us each
a continent and inner sea
Atlantis buried outside
to be won.
A Turning Wind
1939
…for the forms of nature are awakened, and are as a turning wheel, and so they carry their spirit the wind.
Boehme
1 Moment of Proof
READING TIME : 1 MINUTE 26 SECONDS
The fear of poetry is the
fear : mystery and fury of a midnight street
of windows whose low voluptuous voice
issues, and after that there is no peace.
That round waiting moment in the
theatre : curtain rises, dies into the ceiling
and here is played the scene with the mother
bandaging a revealed son's head. The bandage is torn off.
Curtain goes down. And here is the moment of proof.
That climax when the brain acknowledges the world,
all values extended into the blood awake.
Moment of proof. And as they say Brancusi did,
building his bird to extend through soaring air,
as Kafka planned stories that draw to eternity
through time extended. And the climax strikes.
Love touches so, that months after the look of
blue stare of love, the footbeat on the heart
is translated into the pure cry of birds
following air-cries, or poems, the new scene.
Moment of proof. That strikes long after act.
They fear it. They turn away, hand up palm out
fending off moment of proof, the straight look, poem.
The prolonged wound-consciousness after the bullet's shot.
The prolonged love after the look is dead,
the yellow joy after the song of the sun.
SONG, THE BRAIN-CORAL
Lie still, be still, love, be thou not shaken,
it is for me to be shaken,
to bring tokens.
Among the yellow light in the hot gardens,
the thinned green light in the evening gardens,
I speak of gladness.
Let the great night, wearing its moods and shadows
find us so, stilled within its varied shadows
falling like feathers.
We change in images, color, visions, and change;
I bring you, speak you now a changeless stone,
the strange brain-coral,
thrown white on beaches beside the peacock Stream.
Lie still, love, while the many physical worlds stream
passionate by,
in dreams of the exterior intricate rainbow world,
dreaming the still white intricate stone of the world,
—bring you brain-coral,
a world's white seeming.
TARGET PRACTICE
Near Mexico, near April, in the morning.
Desert where the sun casts his circles of power
on acquiesce
nt sand shifting beneath them. Car
speeding among white landscapes; suddenly
the permanent scene at the dead-center.
Photo, in circles of speed, how at raw barnside
father and son stand, man with his rifle up
levelled at heartpoint of a nailed-up bird
spread, wings against the wood. The boy's arm thrown
up over his eyes, flinching from coming shot.
Bullseye, you bullet! pinning down the scene.
And speed you car over the waste of noon
into the boundaries of distance where
the first ring lessens into memory.
Until, a little lower than the sun,
centered in that last circle, hangs a free
fierce bird down-staring on the target of land,
circle on circle of power spread, and speeding
eyes passing from zone to zone, from war to where
their bullets will never bring him down.
OTHERWORLD
LANDING AT LIVERPOOL
This is the dream-journey, knowing the earth slips under,
not knowing how the sea offers to ships
another sliding line. This is the otherworld
slipping among innumerable nets.
Color and love of land, the water-barrier spills
sleep on the gulls' waves, a sketch of ocean
like children's crayon-drawings, the long North
Sea fanged by icebergs, green and clanging hills.
This was the journey. Out of adolescence.
Past Anticosti, Labrador, past Belle Isle,
end of America. And islands come;
after the ocean, the seabird's complex eye.
Ship's wake at stern, the after-life.
And pass the Hebrides asleep.
Islands identified. Lighthouse and channel-blue
all day, pure Irish fields, a female sea.
Always ahead, new air. Falling behind
wide Firth, the lights of Greenock bank the Clyde.
Ayr, Arran, Ailsa Craig the single rock;
the Isle of Man points water-level Wales.
Coming among the living where we rise,
coming among the dead in whom we wade
kneedeep and undermined; through seas to the great island,
promising continents, the riding shores arrive.
That was the wanted voyage of a child with maps,
an adolescent at books and hearsay of lovers
telling desires dead with the end in sight.
I think now of that port, England ahead,
my clumsy porthole stare at landing-light.
I blessed my luck my landing could be loved.
Blessing my end-luck in this room again
steadily, for the first time steady. Watch
light, lying still, too awkward deep in joy.
All sliding globe-lines on the sea forgotten
and taken into shore where ships lose skill
after fierce water come to blessed end.
THE ISLAND
Land; and only to stand on the ground, stand on the brick of the dark-red
city, stand on the car-crowded dock
with the city beating up at the face, and the harbor-land beating up at
the feet, beating
its stony flatness after sea, with its strange tongues, strange turns of the
head, strange
biddings, strange bracing, strange binding! but the car enters the tiled
tunnel into the
turnings through summer country, among hills stippled with gardens,
the shade-park forests
freaked with sunlight, the Shropshire hedges, the trenchings of lanes,
the grassy
fallen shore-smooth places where this floor of island is a mowed fish-pond,
the deep
grass, the stamping grass and parsley, marigold leaves and daisies,
the car run through a narrow bridge of speed winding the curving
the standing shadows,
along the trellised stream, along the earth-wet-smelling cloisters
stopped by cascades from a loosely practised piano in Chester
shaking its scales loose over the city crowded with speech, the window
where Herbert
and martyred Charles and Lancelot Andrewes are gone in their trance,
in their triptych
of color to Chester's heaven, less vivid burning than blue-burning
glass—
and the fields, and gooseberry lawns, and the ribbons of music broadcast
identical
over the roads, threading the shadows, thinned by the quick and
ranging
eye of the sun who takes this fief with all lands captive daily, gathering
the ripple of
speed and our knees before us and the car's leaning and the enamelled
tree
whose flame is grassland and the tree a fire, sun-shadow, blocking
out black-caked industries, chimneys of blackened cities, hills, hollow
streets
weighing down this driftless, this island, its scarps, its talismanic hills,
its wet-grass-wading counties, ocean-eye out, its moist color, its
leaping
thought lifted to down-dipping suns, standing shadows of the barrow-buried
race,
tombstones set out to pasture in fat grass—and the fashion
whose pulses match ours, an atrophied prince, a flier's career,
the pathic gunman, the gangster mayor, the voice of a mouse—and
the profile of cities,
the cities, the old road through Roman cities, approaching the central
city, the nave of horrible empire,
the proud, the evening-bold—over the last rolled cloudbanks, in a
spume of light, we speed to,
curve to past distal cities. Starfall begins with the miracle over the hill.
And flat on this land the march, farm-foot, barn-foot, field-foot,
silent march on the London streets, come far : with slogans : and slowly,
the tithe-march moves, the farmers lift their flags : their faces break
the crust of nations once more, and farm-foot, barn-foot, field-foot,
pace London : their banners Invictus say We Will Not Be Druv: shoutless
move past the eyes of the stones, the guards, the horses, the houses
where the colonel with the undershot jaw sees the actress with the bulletproof face
see the cabman see the diplomat see the salesman see the colonial
rheumatic sub-secretary see cathedrals see the tourists
see the street see the marchers see the silence see the island
see the island see the island see the faces of the sky.
OTHERWORLD
Coming among the living
at railway stations at the porter's smile
train for the south alone in the brisk winds
a rumor of nothing at all among the forest
coming among the dead
at Dover, a pebbled ridge of the known world
or water or the buffeting sight of that chalk forehead
a cloud over that head
tall over land
and feeling earth slip under
standing among innumerable nets
or Calais the rapid speech the warm hearth-colored brick
silver of trees the wheels in silver laid
Paris the fluent city running by like film
in landmarks of travelogues, the straddled tower,
the arch framing a gas-mask poster, travel on maps
south as the light decays vaulting the hills of a world
melted silver and speed, the water-silver trees
until night spends new air, the after-life sleep
wakes among the spurs and roots of mountains
the heat escaping, the cypress-
licking sky
a country of cave-drawn mutilated hands
of water painted with the color of light
where the world ends as the wheels stop turning
people begin to live by their belief
Rites of initiation, if the whirlpool eye
see fire see buildings deformed and flowing to the ground
in a derangement of explosion falling
see the distorted face run through an olive grove
the rattle of hens scream of a cliff-face and the pylons filing
in an icing of sweat enter these tropics : war,
where initiation is a rite of passage,
simulation of death or real death, new name,
enjoying for a while the life of the spirits, may
travel, assume disguises, indeed absorb fear
see in this end of voyage love like that fabulous bird's
lit breast, the light of the black-crowned night heron
whose static soaring over the central world
identifies armies, takes the initiate
into a room where all the chairs fall down
and all the walls decay and all the world stands bare
until the world is a field of the Spanish War
ships with their tall stacks dipping crowd the air
seas of the sky cruised by anonymous planes
subjective myth becomes a province, a city
whose wish goes to the front with its final desire
monomanias come their diaries their days
the burning capitals
when the bricks of the last street are
up in a tall wave breaking
when cartwheels are targets are words are eyes
the bullring wheels in flame
the circles fire at the bleeding trees
the world slips under the footbeat of the living
everybody knows who lost the war
NUNS IN THE WIND
As I came out of the New York Public Library
you said your influence on my style would be noticed
and from now on there would be happy poems.
It was at that moment
the street was assaulted by a covey of nuns
going directly toward the physics textbooks.
Tragic fiascos shadowed that whole spring.
The children sang streetfuls, and I thought:
O to be the King in the carol
kissed and at peace; but recalling Costa Brava
the little blossoms in the mimosa tree
and later, the orange cliff, after they sent me out,
I knew there was no peace.
You smiled, saying : Take it easy.
That was the year of the five-day fall of cities.
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 19
