Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  over this fighting island in its rain of wounds—

  fighting until the flames grew tall, fighting while waves

  broke and the enemy landed on each wave;

  fighting as if they were the fist of the world

  and they had a world to save.

  Their backs to the immense cloud-melting sea

  empty of help, and the enemy eyes were close,

  and deadly close; they saw those fatal eyes

  and a flag striped on the night in fire and stars.

  The radio spoke its word:“The issue is in doubt,”

  that word went flying out.

  We built this island flashing in the sea,

  younger than the children of these men.

  In the cloud country, among the breathless calm

  Wake was built for a link.

  Eyes of the plane look down,

  find a green footprint in the unmarked sea.

  Eyes of the plane sight the lagoon at Wake.

  There was another look on Christmas Week

  when every fighting man looked in his neighbor's eyes

  and found more will to fight.

  There are two looks in the world: the plane's gaze down

  on a scene of unrolled sea and open land

  as it becomes a single map of space.

  There is the close look of a fighting face

  when the earth screams and fire falls from the air

  and those fighting together look at each other's lives

  and wish, in that moment of proof, more life for the world

  and stand their ground.

  2

  These are the brave of our time, who in

  a new-found world

  stand where the morning lights them and the war,

  throw bravery into the sky while their planes hold,

  read challenge on the sea, the word Surrender

  shining on smoking water, and fire at the word

  as long as their guns load.

  Fight on the beaches in the bloody fighting

  as long as their bodies last. And then they send their word

  into the war that closes on the world.

  They fought at this island for the air we breathe;

  one war, one enemy seething at the beach.

  Without their hills underfoot, not holding the fields

  of home,

  not fighting for land or their streets or the voice

  of American evening

  filling through treetops and into the lighted doorway,

  not for the trumpets and the recruiting kiss

  or the most loved caress, did they look down

  at their flesh,

  see in surprise the sudden wound opening.

  Not flesh, not roses, not our Indian summer,

  the sea-surf at our shores, the flashing cities,

  the multiple Mississippi, the little secret lakes—

  prairie in green winds of spring, smell of

  our mountain snow,

  the radio word of promise in our sky.

  3

  This battle is not finished. They shouted and went down

  in the sky, in the flaming water, on the unknown sand.

  They did not hear our millions as they fell

  who follow the proof of the brave, that the world

  is one world,

  who set our lives and bodies at the sea

  between the future and the enemy.

  The world's the only island, and our men

  and women fight one war; it will be won again.

  They were never cut off from us. We were cut off

  from them.

  This is our age's discovery; sailing fathers

  knew an impossible continent of promise

  existed past danger and named in America.

  We know the world is one; we name it Freedom.

  O many-memoried America!

  This island may be set among your stars;

  planted in freedom, deep in a war for life,

  that war will never rest among the dead,

  the war belongs to the living of the world.

  Shadows of our loss darken the land,

  under their night new armies form and stand.

  Impossible courage that finds impossible chance,

  America planted in a sea of war,

  free as our hope is free over all mountains

  flying, and looking down; and our eyes looking

  directly into the eyes of all the brave

  under a night striped with our fire and stars

  until the war's first weapon is liberty,

  and there is no slaveholder and no slave,

  not even in the mind; but only the free.

  Proof of America in a fighting age—

  we see the face of the world, and its eyes are brave,

  the men and women we stand with fight to save

  our hope, our discovery, our unappeasable rage

  against the enemy cutting us apart.

  The future rises from the fighting heart

  to fly over the world, riding where cities fall,

  where the brave stand again, where voices call

  to us to take their proof, proof of a world to win,

  proof of America to lift the soul—

  fighting to prove us whole.

  Beast in View

  1944

  All, all of a piece throughout;

  Thy chase had a beast in view;

  Thy wars brought nothing about;

  Thy lovers were all untrue.

  ’Tis well an old age is out,

  And time to begin a new.

  John Dryden

  ONE SOLDIER

  When I think of him, midnight

  Opens about me, and I am more alone;

  But then the poems flower from the bone.—

  You came to me bearing the truth in your two hands;

  I sit and look down at my hand like an astonished

  Fortune-teller, seeing the mortal flesh.

  Your wish was strong the first day of the war

  For it had been strong before, and then we knew

  All that I had to be, you had to do.

  Once when you stood before me, kisses rose

  About my lips; poems at my lips rise,

  Your live belief fills midnight and my eyes.

  1 Beast in View

  AJANTA

  1 THE JOURNEY

  Came in my full youth to the midnight cave

  Nerves ringing; and this thing I did alone.

  Wanting my fulness and not a field of war,

  For the world considered annihilation, a star

  Called Wormwood rose and flickered, shattering

  Bent light over the dead boiling up in the ground,

  The biting yellow of their corrupted lives

  Streaming to war, denying all our words.

  Nothing was left among the tainted weather

  But world-walking and shadowless Ajanta.

  Hallucination and the metal laugh

  In clouds, and the mountain-spectre riding storm.

  Nothing was certain but a moment of peace,

  A hollow behind the unbreakable waterfall.

  All the way to the cave, the teeming forms of death,

  And death, the price of the body, cheap as air.

  I blessed my heart on the expiation journey

  For it had never been unable to suffer:

  When I met the man whose face looked like the future,

  When I met the whore with the dying red hair,

  The child myself who is my murderer.

  So came I between heaven and my grave

  Past the serene smile of the voyeur, to

  This cave where the myth enters the heart again.

  2 THE CAVE

  Space to the mind, the painted cave of dream.

  This is not a womb, nothing but good emerges:

  This is a stage, neither unreal nor real,
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  Where the walls are the world, the rocks and palaces

  Stand on a borderland of blossoming ground.

  If you stretch your hand, you touch the slope of the world

  Reaching in interlaced gods, animals, and men.

  There is no background. The figures hold their peace

  In a web of movement. There is no frustration,

  Every gesture is taken, everything yields connections.

  The heavy sensual shoulders, the thighs, the blood-born flesh

  And earth turning into color, rocks into their crystals,

  Water to sound, fire to form; life flickers

  Uncounted into the supple arms of love.

  The space of these walls is the body's living space;

  Tear open your ribs and breathe the color of time

  Where nothing leads away, the world comes forward

  In flaming sequences. Pillars and prisms. Riders

  And horses and the figures of consciousness,

  Red cow grows long, goes running through the world.

  Flung into movement in carnal purity,

  These bodies are sealed—warm lip and crystal hand

  In a jungle of light. Color-sheeted, seductive

  Foreboding eyelid lowered on the long eye,

  Fluid and vulnerable. The spaces of the body

  Are suddenly limitless, and riding flesh

  Shapes constellations over the golden breast,

  Confusion of scents and illuminated touch—

  Monster touch, the throat printed with brightness,

  Wide outlined gesture where the bodies ride.

  Bells, and the spirit flashing. The religious bells,

  Bronze under the sunlight like breasts ringing,

  Bronze in the closed air, the memory of walls,

  Great sensual shoulders in the web of time.

  3 LES TENDRESSES BESTIALES

  A procession of caresses alters the ancient sky

  Until new constellations are the body shining:

  There's the Hand to steer by, there the horizon Breast,

  And the Great Stars kindling the fluid hill.

  All the rooms open into magical boxes,

  Nothing is tilted, everything flickers

  Sexual and exquisite.

  The panther with its throat along my arm

  Turns black and flows away.

  Deep in all streets passes a faceless whore

  And the checkered men are whispering one word.

  The face I know becomes the night-black rose.

  The sharp face is now an electric fan

  And says one word to me.

  The dice and the alcohol and the destruction

  Have drunk themselves and cast.

  Broken bottle of loss, and the glass

  Turned bloody into the face.

  Now the scene comes forward, very clear.

  Dream-singing, airborne, surrenders the recalled,

  The gesture arrives riding over the breast,

  Singing, singing, tender atrocity,

  The silver derelict wearing fur and claws.

  O love, I stood under the apple branch,

  I saw the whipped bay and the small dark islands,

  And night sailing the river and the foghorn's word.

  My life said to you: I want to love you well.

  The wheel goes back and I shall live again,

  But the wave turns, my birth arrives and spills

  Over my breast the world bearing my grave,

  And your eyes open in earth. You touched my life.

  My life reaches the skin, moves under your smile,

  And your throat and your shoulders and your face and your thighs

  Flash.

  I am haunted by interrupted acts,

  Introspective as a leper, enchanted

  By a repulsive clew,

  A gross and fugitive movement of the limbs.

  Is this the love that shook the lights to flame?

  Sheeted avenues thrash in the wind,

  Torn streets, the savage parks.

  I am plunged deep. Must find the midnight cave.

  4 BLACK BLOOD

  A habit leading to murder, smoky laughter

  Hated at first, but necessary later.

  Alteration of motives. To stamp in terror

  Around the deserted harbor, down the hill

  Until the woman laced into a harp

  Screams and screams and the great clock strikes,

  Swinging its giant figures past the face.

  The Floating Man rides on the ragged sunset

  Asking and asking. Do not say, Which loved?

  Which was beloved? Only, Who most enjoyed?

  Armored ghost of rage, screaming and powerless.

  Only find me and touch my blood again.

  Find me. A girl runs down the street

  Singing Take me, yelling Take me Take

  Hang me from the clapper of a bell

  And you as hangman ring it sweet tonight,

  For nothing clean in me is more than cloud

  Unless you call it. —As I ran I heard

  A black voice beating among all that blood:

  “Try to live as if there were a God.”

  5 THE BROKEN WORLD

  Came to Ajanta cave, the painted space of the breast,

  The real world where everything is complete,

  There are no shadows, the forms of incompleteness.

  The great cloak blows in the light, rider and horse arrive,

  The shoulders turn and every gift is made.

  No shadows fall. There is no source of distortion.

  In our world, a tree casts the shadow of a woman,

  A man the shadow of a phallus, a hand raised

  The shadow of the whip.

  Here everything is itself,

  Here all may stand

  On summer earth.

  Brightness has overtaken every light,

  And every myth netted itself in flesh.

  New origins, and peace given entire

  And the spirit alive.

  In the shadowless cave

  The naked arm is raised.

  Animals arrive,

  Interlaced, and gods

  Interlaced, and men

  Flame-woven.

  I stand and am complete.

  Crawls from the door,

  Black at my two feet

  The shadow of the world.

  World, not yet one,

  Enters the heart again.

  The naked world, and the old noise of tears,

  The fear, the expiation and the love,

  A world of the shadowed and alone.

  The journey, and the struggles of the moon.

  MORTAL GIRL

  The girl being chosen stood in her naked room

  Singing at last alone naked and proud

  Now that the god had departed and his doom

  Guarded her door forever and the sky

  Would flame in trophies all night and every day.

  Sang: When your white sun stood still, I put away

  My garments and my crafts and you came down.

  When you took me as a flame, I turned to flame;

  In whiteness I lay on the mist-flower river-bank

  When you as a swan arrived, and cloudy in my tower

  For you as a shower of gold, the lily bright in my hand

  Once, you as unthinkable light.

  Make me more human,

  Give me the consciousness

  Of every natural shape, to lie here ready

  For love as every power.

  I wait in all my hopes,

  Poet beast and woman,

  Wait for the superhuman,

  The god who invaded the gold lady,

  The god who spoke to the naked princess,

  The storm over the fiery wanderer.

  Within me your city burning, and your desperate tree.

  All that the song and the apparition gave
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  To seal my mouth with fire, make me mad

  With song and pain and waiting, leave me free

  In all my own shapes, deep in the spirit's cave

  To sing again the entrance of the god.

  CHILD IN THE GREAT WOOD

  It is all much worse than I dreamed.

  The trees are all here,

  Trunk, limb, and leaf,

  Nothing beyond belief

  In danger's atmosphere

  And the underbrush is cursed.

  But the animals,

  Some are as I have dreamed,

  Appear and do their worst

  Until more animals

  With recognizable faces

  Arrive and take their places

  And do their worst.

  It is all a little like dreaming,

  But this forest is silent,

  This acts out anxiety

  In a midnight stillness.

  My blood that sparkles in me

  Cannot endure this voiceless

  Forest, this is not sleep

  Not peace but a lack of words.

  And the mechanical birds

  Wing, claw, and sharpened eye.

  I cannot see their sky.

  Even this war is not unlike the dream,

  But in the dream-war there were armies,

  Armies and armor and death's etiquette,

  Here there are no troops and no protection,

  Only this wrestling of the heart

  and a demon-song that goes

  For sensual friction

  Is largely fiction

  And partly fact

  And so is tact

  And so is love,

  And so is love.

  The thin leaves chatter. There is a sound at last

  Begun at last by the demon-song.

  Behind the wildest trees I see the men together

  Confessing their lives and the women together.

  But really I cannot hear the words. I cannot hear the song.

  This may still be my dream

  But the night seems very long.

  THE MEETING

  One o'clock in the letter-box

  Very black and I will go home early.

  Now I have put off my dancing-dress

  And over a sheet of distance write my love.

  I walk in the city with my pride of theme

  While the lean girls at their betrayal smiling

  Dance, do their sea-green dance, and laugh in dancing.

  And all the stars fade out of my sky.

  Early in the morning on a windy ocean.