But the impossible;
I know it in its weakness,
Unborn and unprized,
It still commands my faith.
And then I remember the page
Of other words for death.
Then I remember the voices,
The voice not recognized
Or overheard too soon;
Rejected offerings,
Letter and telephone,
And I think of the bombing weather
Fine in the full of the moon.
I think of the big moon
Plain on the gardens,
And the clews of the year.
The haunted gardens wear it,
Knowledge like furniture;
The white frame of the spirit
Whose painting is naked fear.
The girl whose father raped her first
Should have used a little knife;
Failing that, her touch is cursed
By the omissive sin for life;
This bitter year's event and change
Turned to personal revenge.
Paint out the tortured painting,
The scene is too well done
But this processional
Must find some other saint,
Must find some other colors,
Some better expiation
Even more strange.
Murder is not the link;
Meaning must set it right.
Never recommend me grief
Nor deny my horror's straightness,
Early and late I see
The fire in the leaf
The minute's appetite.
If horror fire and change
Bring us our success
The word is indeed lost—
If the frosty world
Start its newest year
In fear and loss and belief,
Something may yet be safe.
Joy may touch the eyes again,
Night restore the walls of sleep,
Ease the will's incessant strain
And the forehead and the breast
And the lung where death lies sleeping.
Darling, if there should be tears,
They'll be no easy movie weeping,
Never the soft tears of grief
That go as simply as they start;
The rage and horror of the heart
In conflict with its love.
January 1941
HOLY FAMILY
A long road and a village.
A bloody road and a village.
A road away from war.
Born, born, we know how it goes.
A man and woman riding.
Riding, the new-born child.
White sky, clever and wild.
Born, born, we know how it goes.
The wheel goes back.
How is it with the child?
How is it with the world?
Born, born, we know how it goes.
Never look at the child.
Give it to bloody ground.
By this dream we are bound.
Born, born, we know how it goes.
Riding between these hills,
Woman and man alone
Enter the battle-line.
Born, born, we know how it goes.
They childless disappear
Among the fighting men.
Two thousand years until they come again.
Born, born, we know how it goes.
WHO IN ONE LIFETIME
Who in one lifetime sees all causes lost,
Herself dismayed and helpless, cities down,
Love made monotonous fear and the sad-faced
Inexorable armies and the falling plane,
Has sickness, sickness. Introspective and whole,
She knows how several madnesses are born,
Seeing the integrated never fighting well,
The flesh too vulnerable, the eyes tear-torn.
She finds a pre-surrender on all sides:
Treaty before the war, ritual impatience turn
The camps of ambush to chambers of imagery.
She holds belief in the world, she stays and hides
Life in her own defeat, stands, though her whole world burn,
A childless goddess of fertility.
June 1941
FROM “TO THE UNBORN CHILD”
A translation, from Hans Carossa
To keep and conceal may be, in times of crisis,
a godly service. No one's too weak for this.
I have heard often about our ancestress,
who was a stupid child, learning her lessons
slowly. In time the village turned
the cattle over to her, and she loved her labor.
Until, in a darkened spring, the war-ghost came.
The arrogant strange leader rushed with his army
across our country and over the frontier.
One evening they heard distant insistent drums.
The farmers ran and stared at each other in the road.
The girl was silent; but her still spirit planned
the act which reaches our village now as legend.
She stole by night from farm to farm unchaining
in every stable the finest and most perfect beasts
and led them from that village, chained in dreams.
Not a dog barked; animals knew the girl.
She drove the herd through towns and off the highway
past fragrant reaches to the mountain pastures'
deep meadows; and she talked to her animals;
they were quieted by the voice of the wise child.
A bellow would have betrayed their hiding-place;
they were never betrayed to the terrible enemy
ransacking their village. And for a long time
she lived in this way, on milk and bitter berries.
At home they listed her among the missing,
lost in the meadows of the underworld.
One day the last of the soldiers left the land,
the soft land lay, green in the light of peace.
And then she gathered her leaves and flowers, and singing
led the wreathed marvellous herd down from the forests;
and the new-born calves leapt along in the field.
The girl had grown tall and lovely in that time.
She walked behind them, tall and garlanded.
She sang; she sang. And the young and old ran out.
And all the cattle streamed back to their farms.
The shouts of the children. The weeping of the old.
To whom do I speak today? Who shall tell us
that you are alive again? Who shall tell us today
that you will eat the bread of the earthly fields?
Ah, this star we live on is burning full in danger.
All we know is this: across existence
and across its lapse passes something unknown.
We name it love. And, love, we pray to you.
—It takes only a second to walk around a man.
Whoever wishes to circle the soul of a lover
needs longer than his pilgrimage of years.
LEG IN A PLASTER CAST
When at last he was well enough to take the sun
He leaned on the nearest railing and summed up his sins,
Criminal weaknesses, deeds done and undone.
He felt he was healing. He guessed he was sane.
The convalescent gleam upon his skin,
With his supported leg and an unknown
Recovery approaching let him black out pain.
The world promised recovery from his veins.
People said “Sin”; in the park everyone
Mentioned one miracle:“We must all be reborn.”
Across an accidental past the horns
Blasted through stone and barriers of sense
And the sound of a plaster cast knocking on stone.
He recognized
the sound of fearful airmen
Returning, forerunners, and he could not run.
He saw they were not flying home alone.
He stood in a down-torn town of men and women
Whose wasted days poured on their heads as rain,
As sin, as fire—too lame, too late to turn,
For there, the air, everywhere full of planes.
BUBBLE OF AIR
The bubbles in the blood sprang free,
crying from roots, from Darwin's beard.
The angel of the century
stood on the night and would be heard;
turned to my dream of tears and sang:
Woman, American, and Jew,
three guardians watch over you,
three lions of heritage
resist the evil of your age:
life, freedom, and memory.
And all the dreams cried from the camps
and all the steel of torture rang.
The angel of the century
stood on the night and cried the great
notes Give Create and Fight—
while war
runs through your veins, while life
a bubble of air stands in your throat,
answer the silence of the weak:
Speak!
SEA MERCY
The sea dances its morning
On my enlightened bones,
Stones of the lip-warm land
Clap my awakening.
The land is partly lost,
The sea is all water,
Half horror and half blue
Shaking its appetites
Among my senses.
History has commanded
All the rivers—
A ship entered the bay
And the sky sailed in.
The twentieth century
Stares from the high air—
The skin of the land
Is shallow and very green
But the sea the sea
Is still, the deep scene
Contains the unbroken
Tides of man.
Horror is appetite,
Hell is lonely,
War's a breath.
Wake us you black
You white you water.
The scream of the gull:
Land's too shallow
Life's a breath
Sea mercy.
Worms be my carnival
Who cries there is no death?
LONG PAST MONCADA
Nothing was less than it seemed, my darling:
The danger was greater, the love was greater, the suffering
Grows daily great—
And the fear we saw gathering into that Spanish valley
Is rank in all countries, a garden of growing death;
Your death, my darling, the threat to our lifetime
And to all we love.
Whether you fell at Huesca during the lack of guns,
Or later, at Barcelona, as the city fell,
You reach my days;
Among the heckling of clocks, the incessant failures,
I know how you recognized our war, and ran
To it as a runner to his eager wedding
Or our immediate love.
If I indeed killed you, my darling, if my cable killed
Arriving the afternoon the city fell,
No further guilt
Could more irrevocably drive my days
Through the disordered battles and the cities down
In a clash of metal on murder, a stampede of
Hunger and death.
Other loves, other children, other gifts, as you said,
“Of the revolution,” arrive—but, darling, where
You entered, life
Entered my hours, whether you lie fallen
Among those sunlight fields, or by miracle somewhere stand,
Your words of war and love, death and another promise
Survive as a lifetime sound.
CHAPULTEPEC PARK—1
The calling and the melody all night long
And then in the first stillness, morning
Leaning over the dark, over the night-park
Combing her blue hair.
After the guitars, after the tide of bells,
Surge, calls, and furious song,
Very softly the trees emerge,
A tree of light beside a tree of darkness.
And in the silent park
A girl opens her eyes and combs her hair.
Freshness of blue wavers among the lakes;
Two people wake, look at the calm forest,
Turn an iron wheelbarrow on its back
And, fanning a little fire under it,
Cook their tortillas.
Morning leans down; morning lifts out of the stone
The angry archaic statue of a god
Watching from live rock.
The Palace whitens, and all the standing fountains.
Snow is shining on the far volcanoes,
We walk smiling down the Philosopher's Footpath.
A young horse runs into the sunlight.
CHAPULTEPEC PARK—2
The city of the heart
Is like this city. Its names commemorate
Beliefs and lovers, books and the body's forms.
I walk among these avenues whose great
Names speak of places and saints, revolts and flowers.
I walk through the night city; walking hear a cry
Calling, “Slaves demand promises, we need no promises,
We are free; we promise ourselves a living world.”
Shadows after the lamps, bruise-color and bronze
On the pure walls of midnight. Dark, my brothers,
Where your dark faces watch against a stubborn sky.
Mystical passion, fury, the taste of the world.
The calling of the world, and everything man fears:
Poetry, poetry, bravery, poverty, war.
And if we weep, it is ourselves we weep,
Not our belief. But in these streets we see
The cheapest tourists, the twisted cross parade.
The city of the heart knows creeping fire
That beats its towers into storms of flame.
Cynics of power come with their shout of blame.
We wake among the dreams; grace has its ways:
Fire and gleam of blood on stone will fade
Into the moment of proof, blood of our days.
Dawn comes to the city and the spirit's city,
Laughs in the heart like a child, and midday flies
Over the dogs with their sharp and primitive faces
Coursing gay and masterless to the zoo.
The live heart laughs and courses and is free,
For the city contains poverty, bravery, war,
But most, a deepened hope, sunlight and memory.
A GAME OF BALL
On a ground beaten gold by running and
Over the Aztec crest of the sky and
Past the white religious faces of the
Bulls and far beyond, the ball goes flying.
Sun and moon and all the stars of the moon
Are dancing across our eyes like the flight of armies
And the loser dies. Dark player and bright
Play for the twinned stiff god of life and death.
They die and become the law by which they fight.
Walls grow out of this light, branches out of the stone,
And fire running from the farthest winds
Pours broken flame on these fantastic sands
Where, sunlit, stands the goddess of earth and death,
A frightful peasant with work-hardened hands.
But over the field flash all the colors of summer,
The battle flickers in play, a game like sacrifice.
The sun rides over, the moon and all her stars.
Whatever is ready to eat us, we have found
This pla
ce where the gods play out the game of the sky
And bandy life and death across a summer ground.
GOLD LEAF
A shadowy arch calling the clouds of the sun
To enter, enter. Enter. But they run.
Their seeking whiteness refuses the false, the thief.
This shadow is rich twilight of gold leaf.
A mask of gold beaten upon the stone
Is a live cheek painted on martyr bone.
If you go through the gold you find a hand
Delicate as foam and at the wrist
Foam and the scarlet cloth of a sick priest.
Until he coughs you will not understand.
You must go deeper to find the pure dark way,
The many crying “Sangre!” “Sangre!” “Sangre!”
Deeper than death the faithful blood will flow
Singing “Mexico!” “Mexico!” “Mexico!”
A serpent in the passionate garden says
“This,” looking at men and saying “this, this.”
Pain and the desperate music of the poor.
The true darkness. A naked human door.
Out of this darkness music of the crowd,
Bells raise their circles of truth and find the cloud.
ALL SOULS
The day of life and death offers its flowers:
Branches of flame toward a midnight lake of stars,
And the harsh sunny smell of weeds at noon.
In the clear season, we sit upon the graves
(Northern red leaf, frost-witches and toy ghost):
Here are the crystal skull and flowering bone.
The cloak of blood down the shoulder of the bull.
Whirl of mirrors and light about the blade
And the bullring turning groaning to the sun.—
We are all sitting on graves, drinking together,
Each grave a family gay on the hot grass,
Its bottle, its loaf of bread in a basket,
And a few peaches too perfect ever to wither.
And the river of light down the shoulder of the hill.
The drink of flowers and fire in the sun,
The child in pink holding her sugar skull—
This appetite raving on death's high holiday:
Love of the dead, fierce love of the alive.
We eat the feast of our mortality,
Drink fiery joy, and death sinks down with day.
O in the burning day of life and death
The strong drink running down the shoulder of the grave!
EVENING PLAZA, SAN MIGUEL
No one will ever understand that evening
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 26
