Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  Who has not lain the night with a changeable lover,

  Changeable as that last evening.

  No one who has not ever seen that color

  Change and travel the hills, the irrelevant bells

  Ringing the changes,

  And seen the green enter the evening sky,

  Reluctant yellow come and the cathedral

  Unfold in rose—

  And stood under that rose of stone, remembering rose

  Spattered in feasts of rockets, interrupted

  By the black downdrawn line

  Of the down-turning wheel of carnival—will ever know

  The evening color filtered through cinnamon

  And how the birds came down

  Through the bars of yellow and the bars of green

  Into the brandy dusk and the leaves of night,

  A touch, a shadow of touch, when breasts

  Lift their little branches, and showers and flares of fire

  Rise in the blood, in spite of the word of war,

  In spite of evening coming down like a lover,

  Like the birds falling among the trees, like music

  As the trees close, and the cathedral closes.

  No one will know who in a stranger land

  Has never stood while night came down

  In shadows of roses, a cloud of tree-drawn birds,

  And said, “I must go home.”

  BEAST IN VIEW

  Configurations of time and singing

  Bring me to a dark harbor where

  The chase is drawn to a beginning.

  And all the myths are gathered there.

  I know the trees as fountains and the stars'

  Far fires fountains and your love

  A vivid fountain, and the bars

  Broken about me let me move

  Among the fountains. At last seeing

  I came here by obscure preparing,

  In vigils and encounters being

  Both running hunter and fierce prey waring.

  I hunted and became the followed,

  Through many lives fleeing the last me,

  And changing fought down a far road

  Through time to myself as I will be.

  Chaos prepared me, and I find the track,

  Through life and darkness seek my myth—

  Move toward it, hunting grow more like,

  Draw near, and know it through our path.

  Know only that we run one path.

  2

  LETTER TO THE FRONT

  1

  Women and poets see the truth arrive.

  Then it is acted out,

  The lives are lost, and all the newsboys shout.

  Horror of cities follows, and the maze

  Of compromise and grief.

  The feeble cry Defeat be my belief.

  All the strong agonized men

  Wear the hard clothes of war,

  Try to remember what they are fighting for.

  But in dark weeping helpless moments of peace

  Women and poets believe and resist forever:

  The blind inventor finds the underground river.

  2

  Even during war, moments of delicate peace

  Arrive; ceaseless the water ripples, love

  Speaks through the river in its human voices.

  Through every power to affirm and heal

  The unknown world suggests the air and golden

  Familiar flowers, and the brief glitter of waves,

  And dreams, and leads me always to the real.

  Even among these calendars of fire.

  Sings: There is much to fear, but not our power.

  The stars turn over us; let us not fear the many.

  All mortal intricacies tremble upon this flower.

  Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.

  We are alive in an hour whose burning face

  Looks into our death, death of our dear wish.

  And time that will be eating away our flesh

  Gives us this moment when blue settles on rose

  And evening suddenly seems limitless silver.

  The cold wind streaming over the cold hill-grasses

  Remembers and remembers. Mountains lift into night.

  And I am remembering the face of peace.

  I have seen a ship lying upon the water

  Rise like a great bird, like a lifted promise.

  3

  They called us to a change of heart

  But it was not enough.

  Not half enough, not half enough

  For all their bargaining and their art.

  After the change of heart there comes

  The savage waste of battlefield;

  The flame of that wild battlefield

  Rushes in fire through our rooms.

  The heart that comes to know its war

  When gambling powers try for place

  Must live to wrestle for a place

  For every burning human care:

  To know a war begins the day

  Ideas of peace are bargained for.

  Surrender and death are bargained for—

  Peace and belief must fight their way.

  Begin the day we change and so

  Open the spirit to the world.

  Wars of the spirit in the world

  Make us continually know

  We fight continually to grow.

  4 SESTINA

  Coming to Spain on the first day of the fighting,

  Flame in the mountains, and the exotic soldiers,

  I gave up ideas of strangeness, but now, keeping

  All I profoundly hoped for, I saw fearing

  Travelers and the unprepared and the fast-changing

  Foothills. The train stopped in a silver country.

  Coast-water lit the valleys of this country—

  All mysteries stood human in the fighting.

  We came from far. We wondered, Were they changing,

  Our mild companions, turning into soldiers?

  But the cowards were persistent in their fearing,

  Each of us narrowed to one wish he was keeping.

  There was no change of heart here; we were keeping

  Our deepest wish, meeting with hope this country.

  The enemies among us went on fearing

  The frontier was too far behind. This fighting

  Was clear to us all at last. The belted soldiers

  Vanished into white hills that dark was changing.

  The train stood naked in flowery midnight changing

  All complex marvellous hope to war, and keeping

  Among us only the main wish, and the soldiers.

  We loved each other, believed in the war; this country

  Meant to us the arrival of the fighting

  At home; we began to know what we were fearing.

  As continents broke apart, we saw our fearing

  Reflect our nations' fears; we acted as changing

  Cities at home would act, with one wish, fighting

  This threat or falling under it; we were keeping

  The knowledge of fiery promises; this country

  Struck at our lives, struck deeper than its soldiers.

  Those who among us were sure became our soldiers.

  The dreams of peace resolved our subtle fearing.

  This was the first day of war in a strange country.

  Free Catalonia offered that day our changing

  Age's hope and resistance, held in its keeping

  The war this age must win in love and fighting.

  This first day of fighting showed us all men as soldiers.

  It offered one wish for keeping. Hope. Deep fearing.

  Our changing spirits awake in the soul's country.

  5

  Much later, I lie in a white seaport night

  Of gongs and mystery and bewildered mist

  Giving me a strange harbor in these white

  Scenes, white rivers
, my white dreams of peace.

  And a ship lifted up on a sign of freedom.

  Peace sharp and immediate as our winter stars.

  A blue sailor with a cargo of guitars.

  I saw a white ship rise as peace was made

  In Spain, the first peace the world would not keep.

  The ship pulled away from the harbor where Columbus

  Standing on his black pillar sees new worlds;

  And suddenly all the people at all the rails

  Lifted their hands in a gesture of belief

  That climbs among my dreams like a bird flying.

  Until the world is lifted by one bird flying

  An instant drawing to itself the world.

  6

  Home thoughts from home; we read you every day,

  Soldiers of distances. You wish most to be here.

  In the strange lands of war, I woke and thought of home.

  Remembering how war came, I wake and think of you,

  In the city of water and stone where I was born,

  My home of complex light. What we were fighting for,

  In the beginning, in Spain, was not to be defined.

  More human than abstract, more direction than end.

  Terror arrived intact, lit with the tragic fire

  Of hope before its time, tore us from lover and friend.

  We came to the violent act with all that we had learned.

  But now we are that home you dream across a war.

  You fight; and we must go in poetry and hope

  Moving into the future that no one can escape.

  Peace will in time arrive, but war defined our years.

  We are like that young saint at the spring who bent

  Her face over dry earth the vision told her flowed,

  Miring herself. She knew it was water. But for

  Herself, it was filth. Later, for all to come

  Following her faith, miraculous crystal ran.

  O saint, O poet, O wounded of these wars

  To find life flowing from the heart of man.

  We hold belief. You fight and are maimed and mad.

  We believe, though all you want be bed with one

  Whose mouth is bread and wine, whose flesh is home.

  7

  To be a Jew in the twentieth century

  Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse,

  Wishing to be invisible, you choose

  Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.

  Accepting, take full life. Full agonies:

  Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood

  Of those who resist, fail, and resist; and God

  Reduced to a hostage among hostages.

  The gift is torment. Not alone the still

  Torture, isolation; or torture of the flesh.

  That may come also. But the accepting wish,

  The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee

  For every human freedom, suffering to be free,

  Daring to live for the impossible.

  8

  Evening, bringing me out of the government building,

  Spills her blue air, her great Atlantic clouds

  Over my hair, reminds me of my land.

  My back to high stone and that man's golden bands

  Who said of our time which has only its freedom,

  “I will not ever say ‘for a free world,’

  ‘A better world’ or whatever it is;

  A man fights to win a war,

  To hang on to what is his—”

  Consider this man in the clothes of a commander.

  Remember that his field is bottled fizz.

  O the blue air and the nightsound of heartbeats—

  Planes or poems or dreams direct as prayer.

  The belief in the world, and we can stand with them,

  Whoever clearly fights the order of despair.

  In spite of the fascist, Malicioso King,

  Contractor, business man and publisher,

  Who will hire a man to hire another man

  To hire someone to murder the man of strong belief.

  Look at him at the Radio City bar;

  Remember that he functions best as thief.

  O the clouds and the towers are not enough to hide

  The little sneer at freedom, the whisper that art died.

  Here is the man who changed his name, the man who dyed his hair;

  One praises only his own birth; one only his own whore.

  Unable to create or fight or commit suicide,

  Will make a job of weakness, be the impotent editor,

  The sad and pathic bull always wishing he were

  The bullfighter. But we remember the changes that he made,

  Screaming “Betrayed!” He forever betrays. He alone is betrayed.

  They are all here in this divided time:

  Dies the inquisitor against the truth,

  Wheeler, Nye, Pegler, Hearst, each with his crews,

  McCormick, the Representatives whose crime

  Is against history, the state, and love.

  I hold their dead skulls in my hand; this death

  Worked against labor, women, Jews,

  Reds, Negroes. But our freedom lives

  To fight the war the world must win.

  The fevers of confusion's touch

  Leap to confusion in the land.

  We shall grow and fight again.

  The sickness of our divided state

  Calls to the anger and the great

  Imaginative gifts of man.

  The enemy does his rigid work.

  We live fighting in that dark.

  Let all the living fight in proof

  They start the world this war must win.

  9

  Among all the waste there are the intense stories

  And tellers of stories. One saw a peasant die.

  One guarded a soldier through disease. And one

  Saw all the women look at each other in hope.

  And came back, saying, “All things must be known.”

  They come home to the rat-faced investigator

  Who sneers and asks, “Who is your favorite poet?”

  Voices of scissors and grinders asking their questions:

  “How did you ever happen to be against fascism?”

  And they remember the general's white hair,

  The food-administrator, alone and full of tears.

  They come home to the powder-plant at twilight,

  The girls emerging like discolored shadows.

  But this is a land where there is time, and time;

  This is the country where there is time for thinking.

  “Is he a ‘fellow-traveler'?— No. —Are you sure? —No.”

  The fear. Voices of clawhammers and spikes clinking.

  If they bomb the cities, they must offer the choice.

  Taking away the sons, they must create a reason.

  The cities and women cry in a frightful voice,

  “I care not who makes the laws, let me make the sons.”

  But look at their eyes, like drinking animals'

  Full of assurance and flowing with reward.

  The seeds of answering are in their voice.

  The spirit lives, against the time's disease.

  You little children, come down out of your mothers

  And tell us about peace.

  I hear the singing of the lives of women,

  The clear mystery, the offering and pride.

  But here also the orange lights of a bar, and an

  Old biddy singing inside:

  Rain and tomorrow more

  They say there will be rain

  They lean together and tell

  The sorrow of the loin.

  Telling each other, saying

  “But can you understand?”

  They recount separate sorrows.

  Throat. Forehead. Hand.

  On the bars and walls of buildings

  They passe
d when they were young

  They vomit out their pain,

  The sorrow of the lung.

  Who would suspect it of women?

  They have not any rest.

  Sad dreams of the belly, of the lip,

  Of the deep warm breast.

  All sorrows have their place in flesh,

  All flesh will with its sorrow die—

  All but the patch of sunlight over,

  Over the sorrowful sunlit eye.

  10

  Surely it is time for the true grace of women

  Emerging, in their lives' colors, from the rooms, from the harvests,

  From the delicate prisons, to speak their promises.

  The spirit's dreaming delight and the fluid senses'

  Involvement in the world. Surely the day's beginning

  In midnight, in time of war, flickers upon the wind.

  O on the wasted midnight of our pain

  Remember the wasted ones, lost as surely as soldiers

  Surrendered to the barbarians, gone down under centuries

  Of the starved spirit, in desperate mortal midnight

  With the pure throats and cries of blessing, the clearest

  Fountains of mercy and continual love.

  These years know separation. O the future shining

  In far countries or suddenly at home in a look, in a season,

  In music freeing a new myth among the male

  Steep landscapes, the familiar cliffs, trees, towers

  That stand and assert the earth, saying:“Come here, come to me.

  Here are your children.” Not as traditional man

  But love's great insight—“your children and your song.”

  Coming close to the source of belief, these have created

  Resistance, the flowering fire of memory,

  Given the bread and the dance and the breathing midnight.

  Nothing has been begun. No peace, no word of marvellous

  Possible hillsides, the warm lips of the living

  Who fought for the spirit's grace among despair,

  Beginning with signs of belief, offered in time of war,

  As I now send you, for a beginning, praise.

  3

  THE SOUL AND BODY OF JOHN BROWN

  Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision!

  Joel III : 14

  His life is in the body of the living.

  When they hanged him the first time, his image leaped

  into the blackened air. His grave was the floating faces

  of the crowd, and he refusing them release

  rose open-eyed in autumn, a fanatic

  beacon of fierceness leaping to meet them there,

  match the white prophets of the storm,

  the streaming meteors of the war.

  Dreaming Ezekiel, threaten me alive!

  Voices: Why don't you rip up that guitar?