Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  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.