Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser
Page 36
The gathering of the powers in.
At this first sign of her next life
America is stricken dumb.
The sharpening of your rocky knife!
The first blood of a woman shed!
The sacred word: Stand Up You Dead.
Mothers go weep; let fathers groan,
The flag of infinity is shown.
Now you will never be alone.
RINGLING
for Toni
Lattice of his back grows, the dolphin-arching, till
That ripple, that stress, dance on a board on a ball,
Bracing are planted among the unbalanced seas
Rooted in whirlwind, flanks of a man whose torse
Unknots becoming the face of all control
Trembling past his tornadoes, rouse of storm
Walking upon one point of make and build.
Black copper acrobat from Ecuador.
Is followed by the blonde and summer one
Fallen in whiteness upon her smooth trapeze,
Swung to no heavier and softer force
Than Monet's waterlilies in his light suspended
Or floating in our joy, or floating in circus air,
The calm eye at the core of the hurricane.
AFTER THEIR QUARREL
After the quarrel in the house I walked the grasses of the field
Until the hissing of breakers and the hissing on the sand
Lowered, and I could see the seed heads and the sky.
A pod of the milkweed burst; it was speaking to me:
Never mind, never mind. All splits open. There is new inside,
We witness. Downwind, the softened asters let me see
A lengthened sky in its mixed oranges of sunset
Gone east and west, glazing the first bare branches.
The branches said: We know you. I remembered a tiger
The winter I was five not leaping in my dream but fusing
All my wishes to run, with his endless glowing look telling:
I recognize you. Kill them if they deny; or wake them. Now wake!
Autumn announcing birds, the flights calling from sunset.
One bird crying: I see you down there, bird! The quick furry ground
Moves with me in small animals whispering:
You are like us, too. And the stars.—I my own evidence
That even the half-eaten and accursed can be a season.
Search yourself, said all the field, understand growth.
When lack consents to leave its seed, waste opens, you will see
Even there, the husband of the spring, who knows his time.
TREE
It seemed at the time like a slow road and late afternoon
When I walked past a summery turning and saw that tree in the sun.
That was my first sight of it. It stood blasted open,
Its trunk black with tar on its unsealed destruction.
You could see blue through that window, endless sky in the wound
Bright blue past the shining of black harm. And sound
Fresh wood supported branches like judge's arms,
Crutch under branch, crutch where the low hand leaned,
Strong new wood propping that apple-tree's crown.
And the crown? World-full, beneficent, round,
Many-branching; and red, apple-red, full of juices and color-ripe,
The great crown spread on the hollow bark and lived.
Lavish and fertile, stood on her death and thrived.
For three years remembering that apple-tree,
I saw in it the life of life in crisis,
Moving over its seasons, meeting death with fruition.
I have been recognizing all I loved.
Now, after crisis of day and crisis of dream,
That tree is burning and black before my years.
I know it for a tree. Rooted and red it bears.
Apple and branch and seed.
Real, and no need to prove, never a need
For images: of process, or death, or flame; of love, or seeming, or speed.
NIGHT FEEDING
Deeper than sleep but not so deep as death
I lay there dreaming and my magic head
remembered and forgot. On first cry I
remembered and forgot and did believe.
I knew love and I knew evil:
woke to the burning song and the tree burning blind,
despair of our days and the calm milk-giver who
knows sleep, knows growth, the sex of fire and grass,
renewal of all waters and the time of the stars
and the black snake with gold bones.
Black sleeps, gold burns; on second cry I woke
fully and gave to feed and fed on feeding.
Gold seed, green pain, my wizards in the earth
walked through the house, black in the morning dark.
Shadows grew in my veins, my bright belief,
my head of dreams deeper than night and sleep.
Voices of all black animals crying to drink,
cries of all birth arise, simple as we,
found in the leaves, in clouds and dark, in dream,
deep as this hour, ready again to sleep.
THE RETURN
An Idea ran about the world
screaming with the pain of the mind
until it met a child
who stopped it with a word.
The Idea leaned over those newborn eyes
and dreamed of the nature of things:
the nature of memory and the nature of love;
and forgave itself and all men.
Quieted in a sea of sleeping
the Idea began its long return—
renewed by the child's sea-colored eyes
remembered the flesh, smiled and said:
I see birds, spring and the birthplace
unknown by the stable stone.
I know light and I know motion
and I remember I am not alone.
The Idea voyaged nearer my breathing, saying
Come balance come
into the love of these faces and forces
find us our equilibrium.
And the child stirred, asking his questions.
The Idea grew more fleshly and spoke:
Beaten down I was
Down I knew very long
Newborn I begin.
And the child went on asking his questions.
The Idea journeying into my body
returned, and I knew the nature of One,
and could forget One, and turn to the child,
and whole could turn to the world again.
Until the pain turns into answers
And all the masters become askers
And all the victims again doers
And all the sources break in light.
The child goes alive, asking his questions.
UNBORN SONG
Rabbits breed, flies breed, said the virgin lady;
But I
Cannot find my fulness where they rise,
My many children, their burning mouths and eyes,
Their bodies that have other fathers made.
The wife gone sterile in her weeping said
Flies breed, rabbits breed;
Faith of our time falls hissing on the sand,
Hard sand, is the hand of man set against hope? My bed
Whispers to me all year my love my hope my land.
Rabbits breed, flies breed, cried the infinite hearts of all the unborn,
In shady leafy places, underseas and in dim rooms, in the prodigal
dark, all things are made again, but here
Among the new dreams and new nightmares, who listens, who
believes? They give their stone demand
To the born, to the seed and seeking. While change emerges like
another power from power, no longer the old good and evil,
but a bless
ing that fares in the world, among the cities torn down
Crying awake, among the clouds who move calling do.
The mouth saying nothing. The air saying live and die.
The womb saying welcome, the sun saying Dare.
THE TWO ILLUMINATIONS
Storm and disorder and the giant emotions,
The seven deadly sins, they scatter all my hope.
To gather them in change I summon up the image
Of all arrangement in equilibrium.
Moments of poise in the middle of madness;
Sharpened as a forest is sharpened by fire,
I mean destroyed.
O abstract jealousy, half angel and half bird,
The bird smashing itself on the lighthouse's flying eye.
Tonight able at last to imagine perfect love—
Out of all murders
midnight in desire.
Now in a twilight moment I summon up twilight,
The two illuminations that can tell
Nothing in any second by themselves—
Only the body's knowledge, many fresh mornings,
Newborn experience says this flicker of air
Over the face, this time's quick light is dawn.
I think too of a longhanded mime of form,
A dancer carrying two great eggs, intricacies
Of music and equilibrium: the boy
A Javanese temple-dancer, thin-fingered, dancing
Turret-crowned, in his dark hands balancing
The eggs.
Come back to me soon. You are my breath and wine.
Did we then wrestle as if we were our angels?
There is peace also,
love changing like religion.
Around your image now my prodigal wishes
Gather in, like the eye's color in brightened rooms,
Contract like a cloud of birds about a tree.
F. O. M.
The Death of Matthiessen
It was much stronger than they said. Noisier.
Everything in it more colored. Wilder.
More at the center calm.
Everything was more violent than ever they said,
Who tried to guard us from suicide and life.
We in our wars were more than they had told us.
Now that descent figures stand about the horizon,
I have begun to see the living faces,
The storm, the morning, all more than they ever said.
Of the new dead, that friend who died today,
Angel of suicides, gather him in now.
Defend us from doing what he had to do
Who threw himself away.
EXILE OF MUSIC
for Naginski
In the last bus last night that dead musician
Rode, I saw him riding, all his orchestras
Lost past belief and under Egypt plowed
By rusty knives, the noise-machines of grief.
Thunder of the senses died,
Stabbed in their singing by a sleepwalker.
You were the man in whose voices the green leaf
Of form was singing, the bird riding the cloud.
Minotaur underwater in the cedar lake,
Naginski, you are your own exile of music.
There were three roads going through that whole land:
The bird's, the bed's, or suicide.
He meant to drown his self. He drowned his life.
Silence lay down fanatically straight.
I am your exile, he sang from his dead mouth,
From the water-maze reaching out his hand and one green leaf.
ON THE DEATH OF HER MOTHER
A seacoast late at night and a wheel of wind.
All those years, Mother, your arms were full of absence
And all the running of arrows could never not once find
Anything but your panic among all that substance,
Until your wide eyes opened forever. Until it all was true.
The fears were true. In that cold country, winter,
The wordless king, went isolate and cruel,
And he alone real. His armies all that entered.
But here is peacock daybreak; thought-yoked and warm, the light,
The cloud-companions and the greenest star.
Starflash on water; the embryo in the foam.
Dives through my body in the waking bright,
Watchmen of birth; I see. You are here, Mother, and you are
Dead, and here is your gift: my life which is my home.
[UNTITLED]
Make and be eaten, the poet says,
Lie in the arms of nightlong fire,
To celebrate the waking, wake.
Burn in the daylong light; and praise
Even the mother unappeased,
Even the fathers of desire.
Blind go the days, but joy will see
Agreements of music; they will wind
The shaking of your dance; no more
Will the ambiguous arm-waves spell
Confusion of the blessing given.
Only and finally declare
Among the purest shapes of grace
The waking of the face of fire,
The body of waking and the skill
To make your body such a shape
That all the eyes of hope shall stare.
That all the cries of fear shall know,
Staring in their bird-pierced song;
Lines of such penetration make
That shall bind our loves at last.
Then from the mountains of the lost,
All the fantasies shall wake,
Strong and real and speaking turn
Wherever flickers your unreal.
And my strong ghosts shall fade and pass
My love start fiery as grass
Wherever burn my fantasies,
Wherever burn my fantasies.
HERO SPEECH
from a play
When the hero of the threshold enters our lives and our houses
The wish that is most human in all of us deepens and feels saved;
it rises
To another level of desire. Himself the man, himself the animal,
Himself the moment makes new the forms, makes our song
and our prayer.
We look at our lives renewed, we have let go of the fear
That went through the old minutes. Our selves begin to speak:
“There was curse on his house. Or blessing. But there is choice.”
Say of this flier, “A skill has taken possession of the man.”
The young saying Dare, the old Praise air, but keep on land.
When we see the hero, his act seeming accomplished, we wish
for him the leader's lifetime,
The drums being here, the loudspeakers, sharp trumpets,
acclaim of sunlight;
The joy of time is the leap forward of a man or a people.
The moment of the leap is ready today.
We look again for the laws of history in the hero's face and his
lifetime,
But it is not like that—he has his speech of thanks, his dazzled
smile of sunlight.
Our acceptance is flowering and sheds on his air triumph.
Our delight is the herald of certain public voices
Arriving to tell us as they always tell us
Take the act and postpone the meanings.
In the world of listen and touch, shining and sounding,
Love and the hero,
God give us each his sin to awaken him.
When in our deep delight we take the gifts of the hero
We are glad, we become responsible. And in an age at war,
Dead power, the lying opposites, the great cities fighting in the air,
We think of flying, the flying of all dreams,
The ancient reaching for the chance to return changed.
In deepest power the changing an
d opening, the seed obeying
its own law.
When we at last take the moment and meanings
There will be set in motion our most dear wish—
For the wish for escape is only a part of the wish,
The wish for death is not what they say it is.
It is a dancing tribal woman who stands among a room
And says, “Won't somebody come and kill me?” and somebody does;
This is in order that she dance the dance of rebirth. Tomorrow.
For the plane is not over power, and the weapons are all weapons,
But the seeds of all things are the ways of choice, of the forms
Declaring the energy we breathe and man,
Breaking. Changing. Forever broken and made.
Through our own need
We come again to our own deep,
We go and grow.
The peace of growth may follow; now we see war in loss,
When we imagine peace it is process, is seed.
It will be given its body when we give it.
But here the nearest: this moment, this hero.
THE WATCHERS
for Carson and Reeves
She said to me, He lay there sleeping
Upon my bed cast down
With all the bitterness dissolved at last,
An innocent peace within a sleeping head;
He could not find his infant war, nor turn
To that particular zoo, his family of the dead.
I saw her smile of power against his deep
Heart, his waking heart,
Her enmity, her sexual dread.
He said to me, She slept and dreaming
Brought round her face
Closer to me in silence than in fire,
But smiled, but smiled, entering her dark life
Whose hours I never knew, wherein she smiles.
Wherein she dim descending breathes upon
My daylight and the color of waking goes.
Deep in his face, the wanderer
Bringing the gifts of legend and the wars,
Conspiracy of opposing images.
In the long room of dream I saw them sleep,
Turned to each other, clear,
With an obliterated look—
Love, god of foreheads, touching then
Their bending foreheads while the voice of sleep
Wept and sang and sang again
In a chanting of fountains,
A chattering of watches,