My sleep opens upon your face to kiss and find
And take diversion of the meeting waters,
The flameless sky of peace, blue-sided white air.
I leave you as the trivial birds careen
In separation, a dream of easy parting.
I see you through a door. The door sails away,
And all the ships move into the real sea.
Let that far day arrive, that evening stain!
Down the alleys of the night I trail a cloak;
Field-dusk and mountain-dusk and final darkness—
Each absence brings me nearer to that night
When I stone-still in desire standing
Shall see the masked body of love enter the garden
To reach the night-burning, the perpetual fountain.
And all the birds fly out of my scene.
THE KEY
I hold a key in my hand
And it is cold, cold;
The sign of a lost house
That framed a symbolic face.
Its windows now are black,
Its walls are blank remorse,
Here is a brass key
Freezing to the touch.
Of that house I say here
Goodness came through its door,
There every name was known,
And of all its faces
Unaligned beauty gives
Me one forever
That made itself most dear
By killing the cruelest bond:
Father murder and mother fear.
What perception in that face
Nothing but loneliness
Can ever again retrace—
Conflict and isolation,
A man among copper rocks,
Human among inhuman
Formal immune and cold,
Or a wonderful young woman
In the world of the old.
I walk the world with these:
A wish for quick speech
Of heathen storm-beaten poems
In pure-lined English sound,
A key in my hand that freezes
Like memories of faces
Whose intellectual color
Relieves their cruelty,
Until the wishes be found
And the symbols of worship speak,
And all may in peace, in peace,
Guiltless turn to that mouth.
DARKNESS MUSIC
The days grow and the stars cross over
And my wild bed turns slowly among the stars.
SONG
The world is full of loss; bring, wind, my love,
My home is where we make our meeting-place,
And love whatever I shall touch and read
Within that face.
Lift, wind, my exile from my eyes;
Peace to look, life to listen and confess,
Freedom to find to find to find
That nakedness.
SHOOTING GALLERY
For Donald B. Elder
These images will parade until the morning
When every symptom is a sign of health.
Man in repose is armed to kill, his sign
The bomber diving down the iron funnel—
Until he is free and the screaming of the boy
Becomes no more than a knitting of the brows.
But now they parade in the city and the cloud.
Or, Don, your gallery, where all images
Pass as a line of targets and the bells
Ring for perfection and the birds go down,
With one dark figure always aiming where
Any right-minded fool sees only air.
If anyone call it supernatural,
Say that all shapes seduce: this space is real,
Say that his trigger-finger can contrive
The Middle West be Spain, the hostile child
At last be reconciled; until this death
Through skill dissolve in the body with all myth.
Monsters of understanding will deny
The body holds all images, but myth
Is in this shape, shape of a target space
That can be filled by the flicker of a face
Until the parade dissolve to peace, the eye
Of the sacred hunter assume his own identity.
SUICIDE BLUES
I want to speak in my voice!
I want to speak in my real voice!
This street leads into the white wind
I am not yet ready to go there.
Not in my real voice.
The river. Do you know where the river springs?
The river issues from a tall man,
From his real voice.
Do you know where the river is flowing?
The river flows into a singing woman,
In her real voice.
Are you able to imagine truth?
Evil has conspired a world of death,
An unreal voice.
The death-world killed me when the flowers shine,
In spring, in front of the little children,
It threw me burning out of the window
And all my enemies phoned my friends,
But my legs went running around that building
Dancing to the suicide blues.
They flung me into the sea
The sunlight ran all over my face,
The water was blue the water was dark brown
And my severed head swam around that ship
Three times around and it wouldn't go down.
Too much life, my darling, embraces and strong veins,
Every sense speaking in my real voice,
Too many flowers, a too-knowing sun,
Too much life to kill.
WREATH OF WOMEN
Raging from every quarter
The winds attack this house
With its great gardens
Whose rose-established order
Gives it its graciousness,
Its legendary fountains
The darkness of whose forest
Gives it its long repose.
Among these fountains walks
Walpurga, goddess of springs,
And of her summer stalks
A gift has been given—
Old sorrows, old beginnings,
Matured a summer wreath.
I offer it to you.
There is no storm can tear
Miracles made of grief,
Horror, and deepest love.
Under enchantment
I lived a frightful summer
Before I understood.
It had its roots in God
And it bred good love
And hatred and the rare
Revelation of fear.
Women who in my time
Move toward a wider giving
Than warm kitchen offering
And warm steady living
Know million ignorance
Or petty village shame,
And come to acknowledge the world
As a world of common blame.
Beyond the men of letters,
Of business and of death,
They draw a rarer breath,
Have no career but choice.
Choice is their image; they
Choose the myth they obey.
The world of man's selection
May widen more and more.
Women in drudgery knew
They must be one of four:
Whores, artists, saints, and wives.
There are composite lives
That women always live
Whose greatness is to give
Weakness its reasons
And strength its reassurance;
To kiss away the waste
Places and start them well.
From three such women I
Accepted gifts of life
Grown in these gardens
And nourished in a season
That forced our choices on u
s
Taking away our pardons,
Showing us in a mirror
Interminable girlhood
Or the free pain and terror
To accept and choose
Before we could be free.
Toward such a victory
Crusades have moved, and peace,
And holy stillnesses.
These women moved alone,
Clothed in their suffering—
The fiery pain of children,
The horror of the grown,
And the pure, the intense
Moments of music and light
That let us live in the night
Of the soul and the world's pain.
O flayed Vesalian man
Bent over your shovel,
You will find agony
And all the fears that rave:
Dig in anyone's shadow,
You find a turning grave.
But there are victories
That finally are given:
A child's awareness
Listening at a wall
To Mozart's heaven of music
In a forgetful town.
The flowering wild call
From a dark balcony
Through fever, war and madness
To the world's lover.
The suffering that discovers
Gambler and saint, and brings
A possibility
Wherein we breathe and live.
These three are emblems of need:
Now they struggle together
In a dark forest
Bound as a painful wreath;
Are in that war defiled,
Obsessive to be freed.
Let the last meanings arrive!
These three will be reconciled,
Young and immortal and lovely:
The tall and truthful child,
The challenger's intricacies,
Her struggles and her tenderness;
And the pursued, who cries
“Renunciation!” in a scarlet dress—
Three naked women saying Yes
Among the calling lakes, the silver trees,
The bird-calling and the fallen grass,
The wood-shadow and the water-shadow.
I know your gifts, you women offering.
Whatever attacks your lives, your images,
And in what net of time you are trapped, or freed,
I tell you that all of you make gifts that we
Need in their opposition and will need
While earth contains ambivalence.
I praise you in the dark and intense forest,
I will always remember you,
Fair head, pale head, shining head;
Your rich eyes and generous hands
And the links underneath
Your lives.
Now, led
By this unbreakable wreath
Mrs. Walpurga moves
Among her fountains.
MADBOY'S SONG
Fly down, Death: Call me:
I have become a lost name.
One I loved, she put me away,
Fly down, Death;
Myself renounced myself that day,
Fly down, Death.
My eyes in whom she looked so deep
Long ago flowed away,
My hands which slept on her asleep
Withered away,
My living voice I meant to keep,
Faded and gray.
Fly down, Death: Call me:
I have become a lost name.
Evening closes in whispers,
Dark words buried in flame—
My love, my mother, my sister,
I know there is no blame,
But you have your living voice,
Speak my forgotten name.
Fly down, Death: Call me:
I have become a lost name.
Don't come for me in a car
To drive me through the town;
Don't rise up out of the water,
Once is enough to drown;
Only drop out of the sky,
For I am fallen down.
Fly down Death.
DRUNKEN GIRL
Do you know the name of the average animal?
Not the dog,
Nor the green-beaded frog,
Nor the white ocean monster lying flat—
Lower than that.
The curling one who comes out in the storm—
The middle one's the worm.
Lift up your face, my love, lift up your mouth,
Kiss me and come to bed
And do not bow your head
Longer on what is bad or what is good—
The dead are terribly misunderstood,
And sin and godhead are in the worm's blind eye,
We'll come to averages by and by.
LOVE AND ITS DOORS AND WINDOWS
History melts my houses,
But they were all one house
Where in the dark beginning
A tall and maniac nurse
Hid tortures behind the door
And afterwards kissed me
Promising all as before.
The second house was music;
The childish hands of fear
Lying on a piano
That was blackness and light,
Opened my life with sound—
Extorting promises
Loud in the ringing air.
After that, broken houses,
The wealthy halls of cloud
Haunted by living parents
And the possessive face.
Power and outrage looking
At the great river
Marvellous filthy and gold.
When love lay in my arms
I all night kissed that mouth,
And the incredible body
Slept warm at my side;
But the walls fell apart
Among my lifetime dream—
O, a voice said crying,
My mother's broken heart.
Nothing was true in the sense
I wanted it to be true.
Victory came late,
Excitement returned too soon.
If my love were for the dead,
Desire would restore
Me to my life again.
My love is for the living;
They point me down to death,
And death I will not take.
My promises have grown,
My kiss was never false,
The faint clear-colored walls
Are not forever down.
THE MINOTAUR
Trapped, blinded, led; and in the end betrayed
Daily by new betrayals as he stays
Deep in his labyrinth, shaking and going mad.
Betrayed. Betrayed. Raving, the beaten head
Heavy with madness, he stands, half-dead and proud.
No one again will ever see his pride.
No one will find him by walking to him straight
But must be led circuitously about,
Calling to him and close and, losing the subtle thread,
Lose him again; while he waits, brutalized
By loneliness. Later, afraid
Of his own suffering. At last, savage and made
Ravenous, ready to prey upon the race
If it so much as learn the clews of blood
Into his pride his fear his glistening heart.
Now is the patient deserted in his fright
And love carrying salvage round the world
Lost in a crooked city; roundabout,
By the sea, the precipice, all the fantastic ways
Betrayal weaves its trap; loneliness knows the thread,
And the heart is lost, lost, trapped, blinded and led,
Deserted at the middle of the maze.
GIFT-POEM
The year in its cold beginning
Promises more than cold;
The old contrary r
hyming
Will never again hold—
The great moon in its timing
Making the empty sky
A continent of light
Creates fine bombing weather,
Assures a safer flight
For fliers, and many will die
Who in their backwardness
Cannot leave the ground.
Weather is not what it was:
The losers are not winning,
The lost will never be found.
The year in its cold beginning
Finds us a good deal farther
From our good weather
Than we had ever dreamed.
Darling, dead words sublimed
May be read out loud at last:
The legendary past
Cannot scare us again.
This is what I have known
After a New Year's Eve
Of a desperate time.
There will be great sorrow,
Great pain, and detailed joy,
The gladness of flowering
Minutes, green living leaf.
You recommend me grief:
There will be no more grief;
Terrible battle that tears the world apart,
Terrible health that takes the world to bed,
Sickness that, broken, jets across the room
Into the future time;
Not the mild ways of grief,
Mourning that feels at home.
I see your gardens from here,
I see on your terraces
The shadowy awful regiment;
The weak man, the impossible man,
The curly-headed impotent
Whose failure did not reach his face,
And then the struggle for grace, and then
The school'd attenuated men.
I know you are moved by these:
The vice of self-desire
That does not lead to crime,
Leads to no action, is rather
Liquid seductive fire
Before the final blame
When there is no forgiveness.
And many lovers fail to love,
Lose the ability to move
Before the supernatural fear
Calls to the natural need
Come to the feast and feed
On a supernatural meal:
The taproot and the sacrifice.
Nothing can arrive to heal
The dead wish, the living face
That sees its disgrace and loss,
But the loss of its dear wish:
The word spoken across
Distance and loneliness—
Communication to the flesh.
There will be small joy:
There will be great rage,
Do not tell me the feeble
Grief of the very weak;
Only turn, only speak.
I see all the possible ends.
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 25
