Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  And if the flashing hay could produce the illusion.

  Cannot without the sea beneath and blue

  on accurate margin the surfboard boy returned

  tiny from the Pacific to a fabulous shore.

  And if the seascape could produce the illusion.

  Cannot without whole scene : city and oilfield

  in metal forests to the hills' mirage,

  Hollywood and the high bare brilliant mountains.

  Illusion of calm over a minute plain

  in steepness opened, an overheated landscape

  familiar in movies and recurrent dreams.

  O prism of summer and produced illusion:

  absolute calm. Past newsreel, print, and view,

  vicarious true images, do you see, over the

  high-flying plane below you, over the harbor,

  over the city, over this precipice,

  do you see hot grass, mile-off counties, fire-surfaced sea,

  obsessions of sight cliff-hung, as movie, as peace?

  PAPER ANNIVERSARY

  The concert-hall was crowded the night of the crash

  but the wives were away; many mothers gone sick to their beds

  or waiting at home for late extras and latest telephone calls

  had sent their sons and daughters to hear music instead.

  I came late with my father; and as the car flowed stop

  I heard the Mozart developing through the door

  where the latecomers listened; water-leap, season of coolness,

  talisman of relief; but they worried, they did not hear.

  Into the hall of formal rows and the straight-sitting seats

  (they took out pencils, they muttered at the program's margins)

  began the double concerto, Brahms' season of fruit

  but they could not meet it with love; they were lost with their fortunes.

  In that hall was no love where love was often felt

  reaching for music, or for the listener beside:

  orchids and violins—precision dances of pencils

  rode down the paper as the music rode.

  Intermission with its spill of lights found heavy

  breathing and failure pushing up the aisles,

  or the daughters of failure greeting each other under

  the eyes of an old man who has gone mad and fails.

  And this to end the cars, the trips abroad, the summer

  countries of palmtrees, toy moneys, curt affairs,

  ending all music for the evening-dress audience.

  Fainting in telephone booth, the broker swears.

  “I was cleaned out at Forty—” “No golf tomorrow” “Father!”

  but fathers there were none, only a rout of men

  stampeded in a flaming circle; and they return

  from the telephones and run down the velvet lane

  as the lights go down and the Stravinsky explodes

  spasms of rockets to levels near delight,

  and the lawyer thinks of his ostrich-feather wife

  lying alone, and knows it is getting late.

  He journeys up the aisle, and as Debussy begins,

  drowning the concert-hall, many swim up and out,

  distortions of water carry their bodies through

  the deformed image of a crippled heart.

  The age of the sleepless and the sealed arrives.

  The music spent. Hard-breathing, they descend,

  wait at the door or at the telephone.

  While from the river streams a flaw of wind,

  washing our sight; while all the fathers lie

  heavy upon their graves, the line of cars progresses

  toward the blue park, and the lobby darkens, and we

  go home again to the insane governess.

  The night is joy, and the music was joy alive,

  alive is joy, but it will never be

  upon this scene upon these fathers these cars

  for the windows already hold photography

  of the drowned faces the fat the unemployed—

  pressed faces lie upon the million glass

  and the sons and daughters turn their startled faces

  and see that startled face.

  FROM THE DUCK-POND TO THE CAROUSEL

  Playing a phonograph record of a windy morning

  you gay you imitation summer

  let's see you slice up the Park

  in green from the lake drawn bright in silver salt

  while the little girl playing (in iodine and pink)

  tosses her crumbs and they all rise to catch

  lifting up their white and saying Quack.

  O you pastoral lighting what are you getting away with?

  Wound-up lovers fidgeting balloons and a popsicle man

  running up the road on the first day of spring.

  And the baby carriages whose nurses with flat heels

  (for sufferance is the badge of all their tribe)

  mark turning sunlight on far avenues

  etch beacons on the grass. You strenuous baby

  rushing up to the wooden horses

  with their stiff necks, their eyes,

  and all their music!

  Fountains! sheepfolds! merry-go-round!

  The seal that barking slips Pacifics dark-

  diving into his well until up! with a fish!

  The tiglon resembling his Siberian sire,

  ice-cream and terraces and twelve o'clock.

  O mister with the attractive moustache,

  How does it happen to be you?

  Mademoiselle in cinnamon zoo,

  Hello, hello.

  ASYLUM SONG

  As I went down the road to the water, the river to the sea,

  the valley narrowed to a cat's-eye jewel,

  one middle streak of highlight straightening;

  and nothing was plain in the river-light,

  not even what I was hurrying for

  as I walked and thought

  At the waterfront they are free.

  As I went down past the low barren orchards hanging in the dark

  (They are free at the waterfront),

  I heard the night-bird answer :“The trees suffered too much,

  “now they are sterile; but in your city

  “the ghosts of houses struggle to put down roots,

  “and in the rooms, they have nightmares of freedom,

  “they are jealous of any fruit.”

  As I crossed over Gravelly Run, I looked into the water

  (They are free at the waterfront),

  not one cloud whitening the brown black water,

  but there I saw my face so bare

  not blemished but unlit,

  I thought, if I am not almost free

  there's an end of wit.

  As I came toward the sea, I saw the marks of night

  walk on and over the sky and night went over

  without a sound on the wide water

  but the sea's sound and the windspin

  talking to ships slave under the sea

  and on the sea obsessed with tide

  as the long tides came in.

  THE VICTIMS, A PLAY FOR THE HOME

  And if the curtain lifts, it is a window-shade,

  and if there is a stage, it is the room at home.

  Furnished as we remember it. Not too well lit.

  The wooden chair the bed quite neatly made.

  The face is discovered in shadow, but someone is there.

  If we look without fear, we will all know who it is.

  This is a theatre and many masks have played

  the part; female or male : it will not matter here.

  The role is traditional. It does what others did,

  if anything is said, it is what others said.

  The exits are a window and a door, both shut.

  We in the audience know what is in that head,

  see only the fixtures of that room, but hear
the loud

  and ringing world; doorbell, radio, phones, and voices in the hall;

  the words in the parents' bedroom; the shot in the street.

  The play could be anywhere; the stage could expand. It does not.

  Its acts are single actions in the player's head;

  watch Act One. Player crosses—hero and bride and clown—

  and flings the window up letting the dark shine down,

  the black in whom no coward is afraid.

  Stares from the window into the audience,

  a mirror of the world that stays and stares

  and sees the player staring think, dismayed,

  of an immense vaudeville of a century

  when anyone may sit in a row of chairs

  dummy of a ventriloquist who made

  a head lying in his hand speak with a candid voice.

  The play the player sees is at the margin of the mind.

  The player thinks : Who speaks for me? What road

  takes me away from here? The door's or window's? Act Two.

  The player crosses the room to the desk; looks down.

  Letters from friends are clews, the child at the shore,

  the oversize girl, and the adolescent swayed

  by every attraction. The letters are appeals : We Need.

  Come out and help us. We did not remain.

  The little boy runs into his green wave,

  movies are teaching the slickhaired shortstop love,

  the fat girl is seen entering cafeterias

  pretending she's pregnant so people will be kind.

  They show the player no exit of rescue. Act Three.

  Stands at the door, flattened against the wood,

  hearing the parents' quarrel, thinking of father

  who was the mother's favorite child, the mother

  who was the father's favorite daughter, drawing

  comfort from the bodies of her children, lowered

  resistance in them, told them to love one person

  which was impossible : they needed first two parents,

  they were lost : there came upon them confusion of sex

  and the maternal was male, and the great breast was drawn

  forever in remembrance over the stammering mouth.

  The player runs to the bed, slaps tired body down.

  Act Four. Radio playing Sweet Mystery of Life.

  The hands are hidden and the sobbing's hard.

  The loyal, the little; and the father is absent,

  his feet are on a desk, trucks roll over his heart,

  and the mother's hysterics menace the whole house,

  resolving nothing. They change; cancers invade them.

  The player gets up in hatred, goes to the window, leans

  out over the audience, speculates, Should you jump?

  Walk down that roomlong road? It will not take you home.

  As each step falls, a birth arrives. It is not you.

  The sky of the Fifth Act is slant and tall,

  sails on its kelson cloud. A champion angel stands,

  possibly, on an arch in a spill of gold.

  But if it does, it is a statue. The end's prepared.

  This victim must come to death as the shade goes down.

  The player turns in the middle of the room, and speaks.

  “Bargain,” shouts to the audience, “bargain, but answer!

  “I will tell you what I am if you tell me where you are.

  “Not everything that happens happens in the street!

  “You are souls riding me, and I'm to be your ghost—

  “I have more in me than that! Ticket-taker, their money back!

  “I know a way to start!” Laughs, and slams out the door.

  M-DAY'S CHILD

  M-Day's child is fair of face,

  Drill-day's child is full of grace,

  Gun-day's child is breastless and blind,

  Shell-day's child is out of its mind,

  Bomb-day's child will always be dumb,

  Cannon-day's child can never quite come,

  but the child that's born on the Battle-day

  is blithe and bonny and rotted away.

  SPEECH FOR THE ASSISTANT, FROM HOUDINI

  for Marya Zaturenska

  And for the man with one nightmare, the student of clouds, the bitter

  hero whose silly laurels, kept on his head, confess he knows his Brutus,

  the tall political speaker, alone on his platform, the wooden echoes, the batter

  words, who wishes he could sail in the middle of the ocean, and never move at all,

  for all those who freeze alone in the middle of madness, of sleep, of the better

  madness of speed, hands frozen to the frozen steering-wheel, a circuit of cold coming

  around through their lives, their current of loneliness, I tell of the single face;

  a windowpane, two stains where eyes should stammer;

  the head in the barber-chair, nothing behind it but hands;

  ghosts, boat-burial, a headless coat on the dancing clothesline.

  A shouting single dream of alone,

  or the islanded paranoiac insisting

  my dear dear dear dear dear dear dear

  my dear my dear dear.

  The one dream spoken, or the bird more alone,

  rising to spill that lake, his music, over

  repeated cities whose ragmen crowd the docks

  staring at scraps, whose brutes, whose chinless villains

  under the flag speak to their crowds

  alone, howling; alone, falling; alone and alone among

  all the anonymous who work and meet and scatter

  and write the criminal words, “Burn this,” under the letter.

  And the pillars of the cities with their poor against them,

  the men in the sky, riding the cylinder hung on hero chains,

  the men in the airlock, waiting; in the subway, sitting

  at puzzles and headlines, waiting.

  And always these figures with the averted face.

  Winter advancing, the white, the witless season,

  and the spirit waiting.

  The cold comes fast, an appetite of air—

  earth-eating serpent, my Faust, swallowing

  the alone and the falling and the howls of day.

  The core is in the head, five-fingered wrong

  throws a switch in the head; loneliness, fear,

  the deaf indifferent suicide seeking the water,

  abnormal batters who will not hit the ball,

  magicians imagining rack and oubliette;

  the athlete owning his gun; the priest his persecution,

  the speaker his curse; the uniform its muscle.

  But I remember I am hands and whole,

  head, breasts, and white, and to be used.

  Only those passed through madness have any sense for us,

  whose eyes say I have seen, whose mouths read I have been there.

  Alone and waiting cold so long.

  Race up, race up, you fiery man.

  He does not try; he dares not; or caring, cannot cure.

  When song is insecure, again

  the solo lark goes mad for song.

  JUDITH

  This is a dark woman at a telephone

  thinking ‘brown blood, brown blood’ and calling

  numbers, saying to her friend, “I will be gone

  “a month or two,” breaking a weekend saying

  “I will be back in a week,” in an undertone

  to her doctor, “I will take care of the child,

  “I may be back within the year,” thinking alone

  ‘brown blood’ and staring hard at the furniture

  remembering the nightmares of a room

  she leaves, forever clamped at her breastbone.

  This is a woman recalling waters of Babylon,

  seeing all charted life as a homicide map

  flooded up to th
e X which marks her life's

  threatened last waterline. Safety now for her husband,

  no taint—brown blood for him, the naked blond,

  the tall and safe. For her, the bottomless ship

  inviting to voyage—the sly advertisement,

  as the enemy in war invites to luxury:

  “Our side has its meat, wine, and cigarettes.”

  Prediction of no safety for the bone.

  This is a woman putting away close pain,

  child of a stolid mother whose family runs wild,

  abandons fear, abandons legend; while the insane

  French peasant is caught, stalking and barking Heil,

  fire, anemia, famine, the long smoky madness

  a broken century cannot reconcile.

  Agons of blood, brown blood, and a dark woman

  leaves the blond country with a backward look,

  adventures into the royal furious dark

  already spread from Kishinev to York.

  At the green sources of the Amazon

  a bird develops, who repeats his race

  whole in a lifetime; hatched with primitive claws

  he grows and can absorb them and is grown

  to a green prime of feathers. This is known.

  A woman sitting at a telephone

  repeats her race, hopes for the trap's defence.

  Defenders rumored nothing but skeleton.

  Applause of news. Suicides reaching for

  ritual certainty in their last impatience.

  These dragon-surrounded young cannot obtain,

  and the white children who become unreal,

  live responsive as smoke and travel alone,

  wish revocation of fugitives and banned,

  know sun-roar, fatal telephones, the hand

  palm placing out, the fact wanting its rant.

  Cry to the newborn, the youngest in the world

  for a new twisting wind to be all winds

  to cancel this, rejuvenating rain

  to wash it away, forces to fight it down.

  A dark-faced woman at a telephone

  answered by silence and cruelest dragon-silence;

  she knows the weakness of the dim and alone,

  compunctive bitter essence of the wound,

  the world-spike that is driven through all our hearts.

  She will go like a woman sweated from a stone

  out from these boundaries, while a running cloud

  in that bruised night no bigger than a brain

  joins in a cloud-race over the flat of sky

  in persecution of the whitened moon.

  2 Lives