Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  First day, no writers. Second, no telephones. Third

  no venereal diseases. Fourth, no income tax. And on

  the fifth, at noon.

  The nuns blocked the intersections, reading.

  I used to go walking in the triangle of park,

  seeing that locked face, the coarse enemy skin,

  the eyes with all the virtues of a good child,

  but no child was there, even when I thought, Child!

  The 4 a.m. cop could never understand.

  You said, not smiling, You are the future for me,

  but you were the present and immediate moment

  and I am empty-armed without, until to me is given

  two lights to carry : my life and the light of my death.

  If the wind would rise, those black throbbing umbrellas

  fly downstreet, the flapping robes unfolding,

  my dream would be over, poisons cannot linger

  when the wind rises…

  All that year, the classical declaration of war was lacking.

  There was a lot of lechery and disorder.

  And I am queen on that island.

  Well, I said suddenly in the tall and abstract room,

  time to wake up.

  Now make believe you can help yourself alone.

  And there it was, the busy crosstown noontime

  crossing, peopled with nuns.

  Now, bragging now,

  that flatfoot slambang victory,

  thanks to a trick of wind

  will you see faces blow, and though their bodies

  by God's grace will never blow,

  cities shake in the wind, the year's over,

  calendars tear, and their clothes blow. O yes!

  FOR FUN

  It was long before the national performance,

  preparing for heroes,

  carnival-time, time of

  political decorations and the tearing of treaties.

  Long before the prophecies came true.

  For cities also play their brilliant lives.

  They have their nightmares. They have their nights of peace.

  Senility, wisecracks, tomb, tomb.

  Bunting, plaster of Paris whores, electrified unicorns.

  Pyramids of mirrors and the winking sphinx,

  flower mosaics on the floors of stores,

  ballets of massacres. Cut-glass sewers,

  red velvet hangings stained the walls of jails,

  white lacquer chairs in the abortionists',

  boxers, mummies for policemen, wigs

  on the meat at the butchers', murderers

  eating their last meal under the Arch of Peace.

  The unemployed brought all the orange trees,

  cypress trees, tubbed rubber-plants, and limes,

  conifers, loblolly and the tamaracks,

  incongruous flowers to a grove wherein

  they sat, making oranges. For in that cold season

  fruit was golden could not be guaranteed.

  It was long before the riderless horse came streaming

  hot to the Square. I walked at noon and saw

  that face run screaming through the crowd saying Help

  but its mouth would not open and they could not hear.

  It was long before the troops entered the city

  that I looked up and saw the Floating Man.

  Explain yourself I cried at the last. I am

  the angel waste, your need which is your guilt,

  answered, affliction and a fascist death.

  It was long before the city was bombed I saw

  fireworks, mirrors, gilt, consumed in flame,

  we show this you said the flames, speak it speak it

  but I was employed then making straw oranges.

  Everything spoke : flames, city, glass, but I

  had heavy mystery thrown against the heart.

  It was long before the fall of the city.

  Ten days before the appearance of the skull.

  Five days until the skull showed clean,

  and now the entry is prepared.

  Carnival's ready.

  Let's dance a little before we go home to hell.

  CORRESPONDENCES

  …the primary purpose here being simply to indicate that, whatever “free play” there may be in esthetic enterprise, it is held down by the gravitational pull of historical necessities…

  Kenneth Burke, in Attitudes toward History

  DEMOCRITUS LAUGHED

  Democritus laughed when he

  saw his whole universe

  combined of atoms, and

  the gods destroyed—

  He killed the ghostly

  vengeance deep at the source,

  holding bright philosophical sand

  up for a threat—

  laughing his soldier laughter

  with ages of troops after

  who grin with reason in

  the trenches of

  metaphysics, astronomy, disease,

  philosophy, the state, and poetry,

  the black-and-white war on sin,

  the dead wars, the impossible dark wars,

  the war on starve, the war on kill, the war on love,

  the war on peace.

  TREE OF DAYS

  I was born in winter when

  Europe heard the early guns,

  when I was five, the drums

  welcomed home the men.

  The spring after my birth

  a tree came out of the lake,

  I laughed, for I could not speak;

  the world was there to learn.

  The richest season in

  the headlines fell as I was ten,

  but the crazies were forgotten,

  the fine men, the bravest men.

  When I had reached fifteen,

  that pliant tree was dark,

  breadlines haunted the parks—

  the books tricked-in that scene.

  No work in any town

  when I was twenty, cured

  the thin and desperate poor

  from being forced alone.

  Clear to half a brain

  in a blind man's head,

  war must follow that tide

  of running milk and grain.

  Now China's long begun,

  that tree is dense and strong,

  spreading, continuing—

  and Austria; and Spain.

  If some long unborn friend

  looks at photos in pity,

  we say, sure we were happy,

  but it was not in the wind.

  Half my twenties are gone

  as the crazies take to the planes,

  the fine men, the bravest men,

  and the war goes on.

  1/26/39

  When Barcelona fell, the darkened glass

  turned on the world an immense ruinous gaze,

  mirror of prophecy in a series of mirrors.

  I meet it in all the faces that I see.

  Decisions of history the radios reverse;

  storm over continents, black rays around the chief,

  finished in lightning, the little chaos raves.

  I meet it in all the faces that I see.

  Inverted year with one prophetic day,

  high wind, forgetful cities, and the war,

  the terrible time when everyone writes “hope.”

  I meet it in all the faces that I see.

  When Barcelona fell, the cry on the roads

  assembled horizons, and the circle of eyes

  looked with a lifetime look upon that image,

  defeat among us, and war, and prophecy,

  I meet it in all the faces that I see.

  CORRESPONDENCES

  Wars between wars, laughter behind the lines.

  Fighting behind the lines. Not children laughing,

  but the trench-laughter of the wounded, of radios,

  of animal cartoons, the lonely broadcast
<
br />   on the taxi dashboard, behind the wrecking crew

  lit by a naked bulb—to the forgetful bars

  prisms and amber shaken with laughter, to the ships at sea.

  To the maleficent walls of cities, and an old actress

  trying against the trying wind under the skyscrapers,

  blind ageing face up, still the look of the lioness,

  walking close to the buildings, along the wall,

  she licks her lips in panic of loneliness.

  She understands the laughter that rides around the streets,

  blowing the news to the stone-lands, the swamp-lands, the dust-land,

  where omens of war, restless in clouds of dust,

  mean dust is never an anachronism

  and ruin's news.

  The actress knows. Laughter takes up the slack,

  changes the fact, narrowing it to nothing,

  hardly a thing but silence on a stage.

  Crack of laughter. Walls go white, and the plain open note

  talks in a houseful of noise. Reply : Now hide!

  Over the air, the blindfold answer, the news of force,

  the male and hairless hand of fear

  in a shiny leather sleeve

  armed.

  The radiations of harm : black grooves in photographs,

  blackness in spokes playing from Hitler's head.

  A head with one nightmare.

  Expect failure of plans, the floodgates closing,

  failure of traffic-control, loss of voice, fog.

  Wires dead, defection of your central power-plant.

  A code : Laughter. What alphabet are they using?

  Many wished for little.

  Many asked unity.

  We had our characters as we had our cities,

  or as a lyric poet has his voices, audible

  as separate lives, maturing in poise, and symbols

  coming to their “great period,” too big to kill,

  able to batter at the jetties of hell.

  Rites of initiation of our lives:

  by filth in childhood,

  by wealth in the middle,

  by death at the end.

  We knew the dear, the enemy, we saw the spy

  whisper at ear, the agency suggest,

  and where no secrecy and treason were

  we saw the novelist, pimp of character,

  develop the age so it be understood

  to read like his book, a city of the dead.

  But the century had its rites, its politics,

  machineries whose characters were wars.

  Ceremonies of further separation. And now, our backs to brick,

  war closes in, calling us to the guns

  to make accounting how our time was spent.

  And the planes fall. Soon the whole incident is

  over, all but the consequences.

  Laughter, and childhood; and laughter; and age; or death.

  Call to the male puppet, Croak,

  and to the female puppet, Shriek,

  and turn on me your gun for luck.

  Take us our sacrifices, a wish for the living,

  this foil of thought, this soil from which we sprang,

  fugal music of peace, the promises well-kept,

  the big and little diaries of the dead.

  The song of occupations and the ghosts,

  the historian, pimp of centuries, the general, pimp of wars,

  the Floating Man, gentle above the cities,

  afraid to touch, a cloud before his head,

  laughing the laugh of a man about to be drafted,

  the flier, mock-protagonist of his time,

  refugees who reserve a final condemnation

  and see a richer horror in the sky.

  Humor, saliva of terror, will not save the day

  or even one moment when the cities are

  high in a boneyard where clowns ride up and down

  and a night crew works quickly before morning;

  while news arrives of the death of others,

  laughter of brothers and the brother wars,

  works of an age among such characters.

  Violent electric night! and the age spiralling past

  and the sky turning over, and the wind turning the stars.

  NOGUCHI

  Since very soon it is required of you.

  Even here, on this bed, your face turned up and away,

  a strong statue's face turning up and away,

  the spangled eye staring live and away.

  And the call comes : Open and now obey.

  Now it is coming from a roomful of cats,

  the dead man on the cot, desert outside,

  mesa and goldmine around a tombstone town.

  The cat flies shouting from the dead man's mouth.

  News of the world : Open and now obey.

  Now it is coming during the major climax,

  when the brain is suprised and singing only medley.

  Or in the meeting. Or at lunch around the rink

  with the stranger and the stories of Libyan maneuvers,

  horror's imperative the heart obeys.

  When they ask you What were you doing at that hour,

  When the headlines predicted it What street did you walk down?

  When they insist Prove yourself alive that afternoon

  It was coming then And everybody saw it

  Your life pointed to that That was your world.

  I think of effort. Brought us to birth in force.

  Noguchi's mother with her scalded child

  wedged her awake with splinters in the eyes.

  If you are falling fallen failing, force

  will suffice, must fix yourself alert.

  Sleeping, I saw awake a widened world.

  I saw a well full of men's eyes that weep,

  wrong ghosts sailing the cities praised our night,

  but effort of light comes, overflow morning

  waking no weeping, the series of twelve doors

  strike shut like clock, but my light will not go;

  woke. Love, we'll stay awake until it's healed,

  until the time is brought to a fair hour,

  obey the heart that calls to prove alive

  a love, an age, all soldiers home again,

  the growing time a child up and alive,

  until the world is done.

  SEVENTH AVENUE

  This is the cripples' hour on Seventh Avenue

  when they emerge, the two o'clock night-walkers,

  the cane, the crutch, and the black suit.

  Oblique early mirages send the eyes:

  light dramatized in puddles, the animal glare

  that makes indignity, makes the brute.

  Not enough effort in the sky for morning.

  No color, pantomime of blackness, landscape

  where the third layer back is always phantom.

  Here come the fat man, the attractive dog-chested

  legless—and the wounded infirm king

  with nobody to use him as a saint.

  Now they parade in the dark, the cripples' hour

  to the drugstore, the bar, the newspaper-stand,

  past kissing shadows on a window-shade to

  colors of alcohol, reflectors, light.

  Wishing for trial to prove their innocence

  with one straight simple look:

  the look to set this avenue in its colors—

  two o'clock on a black street instead of

  wounds, mysteries, fables, kings

  in a kingdom of cripples.

  THE SHORTEST WAY HOME

  There was no place on that plain for a city,

  no city can break through the blank of the Black Prairie,

  its stiff grass tufted grey and aluminum birds;

  a province whose design holds fertile seasons,

  black earth, basis for growth; travellers whose approach

  bends daylight through ghos
ts, the reasonable dread,

  frontier familiar form, through color without water.

  There was no place on that prairie for relief,

  until the Blue Marl Lands, relics of ancestors

  passed us, belted by rocks, the tribal poles;

  tourist, we hunt the past as the farmer hunts rain,

  as the manic depressive in tired hunt for equilibrium

  hunts sleep, swarm up the totems for a view,

  see older beds outcropping, dipping seaward and blue.

  There was no room on that road for a shadow.

  Far off the sand-hills blew, domes over rock salt blowing

  echo slant fields in the colors of winter still,

  we pass white obelisks of pioneers, the square hero women

  and also settlers who control the language,

  riding the continent tilting seaward, seeing

  the coastal plain stand faithful as a wall.

  Down-lying, the drowned valleys, the captured streams, the fall

  of barrier beach and hills embayed, the red, the orange,

  the chocolate, the sulphur, the cuesta yellow.

  Profile of waves, a jaw of sand, surface of breakers,

  and there the end of the trip, and the five swimmers

  finding, dive like spread hand into the lit water

  seaming the ocean with silver. Tantrum of light on water.

  The ladies watch whose jewels sparkle as they breathe,

  the stander in wet boat, his net flinching with fish,

  the city at the lagoon, surfboat and speedcar

  see the whole country : Snow Mountain, under which leaps the rose,

  the tops of ranges where no lazy are,

  through Black, Marl, Salt, to coast-land, vein to vein.

  Down-lying, prophetic, the long veins of this land

  passing into the sea without a change of slope.

  Vein of this land feeding on rest again

  eats central freshness, the white implacable root.

  Each birth was earned with convulsions, each traveller's birth

  spoke its word every time the tilt was changed.

  But the ruined mills, but the ghost-towns, but the gaunt adolescent

  short-sleeved, torn-trouser, before the final beach!

  Pathologies of lightnings turn to prose,

  broken and jarring forms to peace.

  A fugue of landscapes resolved, the hunt

  levelled on equilibrium, that totemic head seeing

  a natural sleep, a place for people and peace.

  PALOS VERDES CLIFFS

  And if the cliffs themselves produced the major illusion.

  Cannot without the sun, the flaming instroke

  direct and personal, the haystack on the peak.