looks back to slavery. They burn the shingles down,
the lynched face broken back, mouth filled with fire,
firebrand full in face. The ashes rise.
Chapman arrives to face his empty hall,
courtly, one-handed, turning his handsome side
upon the hall to face his audience,
one Negro woman come to hear. Undoings
walking in all forms, treacheries of the deep
spirit caught in the net. Our need is of new life.
There are these tendencies in America:
they planned John Brown; they do what will be done.
Birth after birth, in the spanned democratic
passage of birth, the incubation motive,
desire's experience, tense for finality.
He is reborn too often; the shock cannot take.
He loosens; fights for war; fights Harvard's plans:
a stone for both sides—he rants, upholstered deep
in Harvard Club armchairs—a monument to Zero.
He is charred out, is calling vengeance on Jews,
he is old and charred. He has been many-born.
Blinks in the fire-world, sees started birds
blinked red and black, the wing a dark log burning
against the sun; flashes of cypress and swamps,
a watery forest of red birds.
Goes down
his altering ash smothers the shock of peace,
he carried flame
but selling-out is not a dramatic moment,
it is the chain of memories parasite,
the thin flame of existence travelling down
until the yellow and alizarin red
flares out. The whole of any life, he said,
is always unmistakably one thing.
And a dream-voice said Freiheit
a crackling globe flew down
fire and punishment, returning grace;
vortex of parable through modes of life
simple and imperceptible transitions
in countries of transition giving other lives
the long remorseless logic of their love.
ANN BURLAK
Let her be seen, a voice on a platform, heard
as a city is heard in its prophetic sleep when
one shadow hangs over one side of a total wall
of houses, factories, stacks, and on the faces
around her tallies, shadow from one form.
An open square shields the voice, reflecting it
to faces who receive its reflections of light as
change on their features. She stands alone, sending
her voice out to the edges, seeing approach people
to make the ring ragged, to fill in blacker
answers.
This is an open square of the lit world
whose dark sky over hills rimmed white with evening
squares lofts where sunset lies in dirty patterns
and rivers of mill-towns beating their broken bridges
as under another country full of air.
Dark offices evening reaches where letters take the light
even from palest faces over script.
Many abandon machines, shut off the looms,
hurry on glooming cobbles to the square. And many
are absent, as in the sky about her face, the birds
retreat from charcoal rivers and fly far.
The words cluster about the superstition mountains.
The sky breaks back over the torn and timid
her early city whose stacks along the river
flourished darkness over all, whose mottled sky
shielded the faces of those asleep in doorways
spread dark on narrow fields through which the father
comes home without meat, the forest in the ground
whose trees are coal, the lurching roads of autumn
where the flesh of the eager hangs, heavier by
its thirty bullets, barbed on wire. Truckdrivers
swing ungrazed trailers past, the woman in the fog
can never speak her poems of unemployment,
the brakeman slows the last freight round the curve.
And riveters in their hardshell fling short fiery
steel, and the servant groans in his narrow room,
and the girl limps away from the door of the shady doctor.
Or the child new-born into a company town
whose life can be seen at birth as child, woman, widow.
The neighbor called in to nurse the baby of a spy,
the schoolboy washing off the painted word
“scab” on the front stoop, his mother watering flowers
pouring the milk-bottle of water from the ledge,
who stops in horror, seeing. The grandmother going
down to her cellar with a full clothes-basket,
turns at the shot, sees men running past brick,
smoke-spurt and fallen face.
She speaks of these:
the chase down through the canal, the filling-station,
stones through the windshield. The woman in the bank
who topples, the premature birth brought on by tear-gas,
the charge leaving its gun slow-motion, finding those
who sit at windows knowing what they see;
who look up at the door, the brutalized face appraising
strangers with holsters; little blackened boys
with their animal grins, quick hands salvaging coal
among the slag of patriotic hills.
She knows the field of faces at her feet,
remembrances of childhood, likenesses of parents,
a system of looms in constellation whirled,
disasters dancing.
And behind her head
the world of the unpossessed, steel mills in snow flaming,
nine o'clock towns whose deputies' overnight power
hurls waste into killed eyes, whose guns predict
mirages of order, an empty coat before the blind.
Doorways within which nobody is at home.
The spies who wait for the spy at the deserted crossing,
a little dead since they are going to kill.
Those women who stitch their lives to their machines
and daughters at the symmetry of looms.
She speaks to the ten greatest American women:
The anonymous farmer's wife, the anonymous clubbed picket,
the anonymous Negro woman who held off the guns,
the anonymous prisoner, anonymous cotton-picker
trailing her robe of sack in a proud train,
anonymous writer of these and mill-hand, anonymous city walker,
anonymous organizer, anonymous binder of the illegally wounded,
anonymous feeder and speaker to anonymous squares.
She knows their faces, their impatient songs
of passionate grief risen, the desperate music
poverty makes, she knows women cut down
by poverty, by stupid obscure days,
their moments over the dishes, speaks them now,
wrecks with the whole necessity of the past
behind the debris, behind the ordinary
smell of coffee, the ravelling clean wash,
the turning to bed, undone among savage night
planning and unplanning seasons of happiness
broken in dreams or in the jaundiced morning
over a tub or over a loom or over
the tired face of death.
She knows
the songs : Hope to die, Mo I try, I comes out,
Owin boss mo, I comes out, Lawd, Owin boss mo
food, money and life.
Praise breakers,
praise the unpraised who cannot speak their name.
Their asking what they need as unbelieved
as a statue talking to a skeleton.
They are the animals
who devour their mother
from need, and they know in their bodies other places,
their minds are cities whose avenues are named
each after a foreign city. They fall when cities fall.
They have the cruelty and sympathy of those
whose texture is the stress of existence woven
into revenge, the crime we all must claim.
They hold the old world in their new world's arms.
And they are the victims, all the splinters of war
run through their eyes, their black escaping face
and runaway eyes are the Negro in the subway
whose shadowy detective brings his stick
down on the naked head as the express pulls in,
swinging in locomotive roars on skull.
They are the question to the ambassador
long-jawed and grim, they stand on marble, waiting
to ask how the terms of the strike have affected him.
Answer : “I've never seen snow before. It's marvellous.”
They stand with Ann Burlak in the rotunda, knowing
her insistent promise of life, remembering
the letter of the tear-gas salesman :“I hope
“this strike develops and a damn bad one too.
“We need the money.”
This is the boundary
behind a speaker : Main Street and railroad tracks,
post office, furniture store. The soft moment before storm.
Since there are many years.
And the first years were the years of need,
the bleeding, the dragged foot, the wilderness,
and the second years were the years of bread
fat cow, square house, favorite work,
and the third years are the years of death.
The glittering eye all golden. Full of tears.
Years when the enemy is in our street,
and liberty, safe in the people's hands,
is never safe and peace is never safe.
Insults of attack arrive, insults
of mutilation. She knows the prophetic past,
many have marched behind her, and she knows
Rosa whose face drifts in the black canal,
the superstitions of a tragic winter
when children, their heads together, put on tears.
The tears fall at their throats, their chains are made
of tears, and as bullets melted and as bombs let down
upon the ominous cities where she stands
fluid and conscious. Suddenly perceives
the world will never daily prove her words,
but her words live, they issue from this life.
She scatters clews. She speaks from all these faces
and from the center of a system of lives
who speak the desire of worlds moving unmade
saying, “Who owns the world?” and waiting for the cry.
IVES
Knowing the voices of the country, gathering
voices of other harvests, farm-hands who gather in
sources of music on the blueberry hills,
the village band, lines at the schoolhouse singing—
lit cheeks and lips over the blown-glass lamps
in the broad houses, along the pebble beach,
or up the baldface mountain's granite sky
above New England, voices of wilderness,
scorch of the sun where ranges all run west,
snow-glare on seaward slopes, sea-breeze and tea,
the voices of stinted music in the towns.
There are strange herbs in the pasture, and the stiff
death angels on the red assyrian stones.
Daguerreotypes and family quiet, wells,
woodwork and panelling, the cloaks of the forest,
all the blinds drawn on the imagination's
immediate mystery of the passer-by.
Intense as instruments to split these sounds
into component memory, and reduce
memory to uncompromising sound.
To whom do I speak today? I've heard their oarlocks turning
at dawn on the river, in the warm bankside light
heard cut trees fall, hickory pull the head
toward violent foreground laughter of torn wood,
watched steeples diminishing in low day before sunset,
and found the evening train riding the bend.
That train will never speak again of tracks
routed to outland counties, but the firm
sumac and corn, broadleaf tobacco farms,
a churchyard murmur for the air of truth,
acres where birds I did not know till now
fly sharp-reflected in water, a field of sky;
over the human lake, the gods make the swallows fly.
To whom do I speak today? Call off your wit and write
for silent implicated men, a crabbed line
of intercepted music with the world between.
Networks of songs, white seagull in white air,
cliff edge and stripe of sand's immovable gulls
hung over women's morning festivals.
Affection of villages whose boy guitarist,
blond, with his rolled sleeve and the girl behind
sings into fire-darkness goodbye after pleasure
and the streets, our liberty, the village store,
songs of the sorrow and mystery of pavilions'
slow carousel-music, bulbs and mirrors in sunlight,
processions of godly animals revolving;
or big October mornings, cider and perry noon
when the child comes open-mouth round the corner singing;
that music of the imagination here
which is the only sound lives after war.
Acoustics of sideshows! and the organist
playing the mirror of the mind again.
Concord whose choice between repose and truth
colors our memory, whose outer islands of thought
are fugal movements in one dignity.
Rebellion of outposts whose deepest results arrive
when the rebellion, not from worst to greatest,
but great to greater goes. The sequent movements
of that developing know supernatural
Hawthorne as dripping wet with guilt, a ghost
personal at first, and national at twilight,
and tries to be universal suddenly at midnight;
know in their pace the supernatural future
and the future of human coarseness, and Emerson's
future, eternity, whose forecast is the past,
and Alcott's suffering, whipping his innocent
boy next to the guilty, since guilt need not suffer;
and Thoreau who did not die of his consumption
but lived with it.
Raise us an instrument
limitless, without the scarecrow keyboard
can give repose and fame to successful painists
playing to camouflage dullness. A scale for truth,
obscurities of a village organist
who satisfies his life on Sunday.
Songs.
Young men singing on stoops, the sickle pears of Concord,
the wheels scraping the curb, lockets of childhood
faith, barn dances, ballads; or those revealing men
I gave a mask, and they to me the secrets
of sensual thought, music and thunderbolt.
The concentrated man bent over drums,
a skeleton over drums, a fritter of triangles
played without aim, spasms of arabesques
in decoration of nothing. I speak a flute over frost,
hypnotisms of trumpets, the plain and open voice
of the walk toward the future, commonplace transcendent
chores and melodeons, band-concert morning
or the ultimate Negro over his white piano
&nb
sp; meaning O Saint! O Blues!
This is Charles Ives.
Gold-lettered insurance windows frame his day.
He is eclectic, he sorts tunes like potatoes
for better next-year crops, catching the variable
wildest improvisations, his clusters of meaning;
railing against the fake sonorities, “sadness
“of a bathtub when the water is being let out,”
knowing the local hope knocking in any blood.
“Today we do not choose To die or to dance,
“but to live and walk.”
Inventor, beginner of strong
coherent substance of music, knowing all
apple-reflecting streams, loons across echoing lake,
cities and men, as liners aloof in voyage,
and their dead eyes, so much blue in the ground
as water, as running song he loves and pours
as water into water, music in music.
Walks
at starfall or under the yellow dragons of sunset
among the ritual answers and the secular wish,
among spruce, and maroon of fallen needles, walks
the pauper light of dawn imagining truth,
turning from recommended madness, from Europe
who must be forced to eat what she kills, from cities
where all the throats are playing the same tune
mechanically.
He was young. He did not climb
four flights on hands and knees to the piano. Heard
the band in the square, Jerusalem the Golden
from all the rooftops, blare of foreground horns,
violins past the common; in the street
the oral dissonance, the drum's array.
Far breaking music indistinct with wheels'
irregular talk, the moving world, the real
personal disagreement of many voices;
clusters of meaning break in fantastic flame,
silver of instruments rising behind the eye.
He gathers the known world total into music,
passion of sense, perspective's mask of light
into suggestion's inarticulate
gesture, invention. Knowing the voices, knowing
these faces and music and this breeding landscape
balanced between the crisis and the cold
which bears the many-born, he parcels silence
into a music which submerges prayer,
rising as rivers of faces overhead,
naming the instruments we all must hold.
Wake Island
1942
1
PROOF OF AMERICA! A fire on the sea,
a tower of flame rising, flame falling out of the sky,
a wave of flame like a great sea-wave breaking
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 23
