Love, sang my sleep, the wavelight on the stone.
I weep to go beyond this stone and the waterlight,
To kiss their eyelids for the last time and pass
From the delicate confidence of their sly throats,
The conversation of their flesh of dreams.
And though I weep in my dream,
When I wake I will not weep.
A BALLAD THEME
She tells:
Sing I chant I
To music in new morning heard
My need has become a bird
And is flown and is free
My need grew stormy and wild
No love of mine had made a child
No song of mine had made my love
To plant my life
Need grew deep about my heart.
They came then with their steely knives
They said Your song has many lives
Now choose you
They split my life while I did sleep
The joy of chance was in my dream
Loving and remembering
The nature of memory
Of the nature of time was all my dream
The nature of love and of forgetting
I dreamed the series of eternity
While I lay bleeding
The joy of choice I sing
That out my wound did spring
My son and my song
Sing I chant I
Now the child is alive and young
And the child I among my veins
Sings and says with every breath
Sing I chant I
ASLEEP AND AWAKE
Asleep and awake, I wake.
Never having written
What I have to say.
No poem offers of me
My central meaning,
I have danced to my naming
And danced away.
Now I move past my dreams:
They yield processions of
Changing images.
I want to speak the clear
The intricate meeting-place
Of all things with all desires:
Cut down by risk to the root
Where everything is given.
The finding of the child,
The lost voices, songs of all
Who take their meanings.
They are beginning the songs.
Mortal, awake, I sing and say
All is immortal, all
Save personality.
Yes, your passion, yes, the time of a flower.
Move in all your meanings,
Go lit by many fires,
Deep in the secret fires
All speak to all.
The deep life lives and dies
Changes, sings, and sings.
Speak before I sleep,
Before the keepings are given,
I find my time, and speak,
Driven toward love and music,
Music of forms and desires.
OF MONEY. AND THE PAST.
These coins and calendars stood for the moon, strong boys,
And the resinous storerooms of a house in silence.
Too many losses among the possible.
But only when you hear their fearful music:
Nothing at all and then the front door slamming,
The cave of sound at the station after all hope has gone,
Fifteen wire hangers jangling in emptied closets.
When you discover the real, lying under, and still,
Among the silences green morning reopening.
Now your invisible path between the brambles opens
To the hill of oyster-shells under the hills of cloud
And the hard knuckles of a boy poverty-driven
And the moon rising in a smell of vanilla.
Voices of money, voices of your past,
The swinging music in these voices telling:
No, no, you must go. Now. Go from this bay to where
You can bridge backward and forward and move toward form.
For here there is nothing. Nothing for you here.
Somewhere you may find something. But not here.
Do not look here, not now. Not anywhere here.
Nowhere, nowhere, nothing anywhere here.
Beyond these coins and seasons, then look back.
When the black voices turn brilliant and call: Here!
[UNTITLED]
“Long enough. Long enough,”
I heard a woman say—
I am that woman who too long
Under the web lay.
Long enough in the empire
Of his darkened eyes
Bewildered in the greying silver
Light of his fantasies.
I have been lying here too long,
From shadow-begin to shadow-began
Where stretches over me the subtle
Rule of the Floating Man.
A young man and an old-young woman
May dive in the river between
And rise, the children of another country;
That riverbank, that green.
But too long, too long, too long
Is the journey through the ice
And too secret are the entrances
To my stretched hidingplace.
Walk out of the pudorweb
And into a lifetime
Said the woman; and I sleeper began to wake
And to say my own name.
THE LOAN
You told me resurrection in images of roots,
Taking upon your summer my defeats.
Now I take on myself your wound's meaning
Private self-given torment, on my mouth.
The open grave stood in your eyes
Past the colors of our meeting—
Stain-moon, accepted curse of a false sun
Your guardians rising at your head.
A mask sang out, swinging away,
The verdicts proven fallacies,
“Lay you sweetly down to bed!”—
But the mask cannot kiss this away, nor wake—
Only you can wake, making go on to make;
Even when all your hope
Is buried dreaming,
The meanings move. Though my words are a loan,
Though your body I love vanish
Evading through our century among
These nightmare judgments of innocence and guilt.
All that I know from you of resurrection
Be passed on as branches, as one leaf.
Even the root of need.
The wound reaches its opposite, shines on my face, a flower
Bright among violence, the passion that is peace.
We have promises to make:
We saw that in each other's eyes.
Not to accept the curse, but wake,
Never to act in formal innocence.
It was not the maze of the time
But possibility we felt
In full gaze as we began to wake.
Not the lock of these years of silence,
We knew lack, we knew withholding, but there was more,
the body of love said so—
Deep it was buried, but it lay there, in all eyes, in the meaning
of sex
Waiting for more life, for it was more, and lively,
More a child running in the fields for his joy of running,
A running like creation, beginning now to make
Day and idea, his acts, his dreams, his waking,
His live ideas of innocence.
POURING MILK AWAY
Here, again. A smell of dying in the milk-pale carton,
And nothing then but pour the milk away.
More of the small and killed, the child's, wasted,
Little white arch of the drink and taste of day.
Spoiled, gone and forgotten; thrown away.
Day after day I do what I condemned in countries.
Look, the h
orror, the waste of food and bone.
You will know why when you have lived alone.
CHILDREN, THE SANDBAR, THAT SUMMER
Sunlight the tall women may never have seen.
Men, perhaps, going headfirst into the breakers,
But certainly the children at the sandbar.
Shallow glints in the wave suspended
We knew at the breaker line, running that shore
At low tide, when it was safe. The grasses whipped
And nothing was what they said: not safety, nor the sea.
And the sand was not what they said, but various,
Lion-grained, beard-grey. And blue. And green.
And each grain casting its shadow down before
Childhood in tide-pools where all things are food.
Behind us the shores emerged and fed on tide.
We fed on summer, the round flowers in our hands
From the snowball bush entered us, and prisoner wings,
And shells in spirals, all food.
All keys to unlock
Some world, glinting as strong as noon on the sandbar,
Where men and women give each other children.
BORN IN DECEMBER
for Nancy Marshall
You are like me born at the end of the year;
When in our city day closes blueness comes
We see a beginning in the ritual end.
Never mind: I know it is never what it seems,
That ending: for we are born, we are born there,
There is an entrance we may always find.
They reckon by the wheel of the year. Our birth's before.
From the dark birthday to the young year's first stay
We are the ones who wait and look for ways:
Ways of beginning, ways to be born, ways for
Solvings, turnings, wakings; we are always
A little younger than they think we are.
THE SIXTH NIGHT: WAKING
That first green night of their dreaming, asleep beneath the Tree,
God said, “Let meanings move,” and there was poetry.
NEVERTHELESS THE MOON
Nevertheless the moon
Heightens the secret
Sleep long withheld
Dry for a rain of dreams—
Flies straight above me
White, hot-hearted,
Among the streaming
Firmament armies.
A monk of flames
Stands shaking in my heart
Where sleep might lie.
Where you all night have lain.
And now hang dreaming,
Faded acute, fade full,
Calling your cloudy fame,
A keen high nightlong cry.
Rises my silent, turning
Heart. Heart where my love
Might lie, try toward my love
Flying, let go all need,
Brighten and burn—
Rain down, raging for life
Light my love's dream tonight.
SPEED, WE SAY
Speed, we say of our time: racing my writing word
The jet now, the whole sky screaming his name, Speed.
But I know rapider, someone hauling horizons in
Beside whom the racing of the suns seems tame.
I know faster than the flashing of suddenly recognized love
Or yellow spring going glimpsing his green fame,
Love after long suffering like inward lightning,
Assumed and lived through where now lovers lie warm,
Wild and at peace among their colors. Speed. And now
One quick-color mouth saying, “Now, love, now;
I have my spirit now, newborn and given,
The live delight;
It now is immediately not only spirit, not only mine,
but delight the forerunner
Of the depth of joy, most subtle, most rapid.
My two speeds, now, at last
Related, now at last in the same music—
Light running before light.”
THE BIRTH OF VENUS
Risen in a
welter of waters.
Not as he saw her
standing upon a frayed and lovely surf
clean-riding the graceful leafy breezes
clean-poised and easy. Not yet.
But born in a
tidal wave of the father's overthrow,
the old rule killed and its mutilated sex.
The testicles of the father-god, father of fathers,
sickled off by his son, the next god Time.
Sickled off. Hurled into the ocean.
In all that blood and foam,
among raving and generation,
of semen and the sea born, the
great goddess rises.
However, possibly,
on the long worldward voyage flowing,
horror gone down in birth, the curse, being changed,
being used, is translated far at the margin into
our rose and saving image, curling toward a shore
early and April, with certainly shells, certainly blossoms.
And the girl, the wellborn goddess, human love—
young-known, new-knowing, mouth flickering, sure eyes—
rides shoreward, from death to us as we are at this moment, on
the crisp delightful Botticellian wave.
THE PLACE AT ALERT BAY
Standing high on the shoulders of all things, all things.
Creation pole reaching over my teeming island
That plays me at last a fountain of images.
Away from the road, life rising from all of us,
The grove of animals and our souls built in towers.
A music to be resumed in God.
Our branched belief, the power-winged tree.
Tree of meanings where the first mothers pour
Their totems, their images, up among the sun.
We build our gifts: language of process offers
Life above life moving, a ladder of lives
Reaching to time that is resumed in God.
Did the thunderbird give you yourself? The man mourning?
The cedar forest between the cryings of ravens?
Everfound mother, streaming of dolphins, whale-white moon.
Father of salmon-clouded seas, your face.
Water. Weatherbeaten image of us all.
All forms to be resumed in God.
For here, all energy is form: the dead, the unborn,
All supported on the shoulders of us all,
And all forever reaching from the source of all things.
Pillars of process, the growing of the soul,
Form that is energy from these seas risen,
Identified. Resumed in God.
VOICES OF WAKING
for the eightieth birthday of Frances G. Wickes
Whenever you wake, you will find journeying—
Even in deep night, dreams surrounding your dreams—
The song of waking begun, prepared in silence,
Planted in silence as her life is planted
Among the constellations and the days.
Whenever you wake, you will hear entering
The song of meanings, a melody of green;
The image of a legendary woman
Dancing among her mercies, in essence emerging
Female to leap into the dragon-throning sea.
Voices of nourishing, lifting the newborn up,
Away,—they lift away, newborn to all,
To the nourisher, to self born, to new life.
Voices of waking that journey in our lives
As renaissance and rain of images.
All of the people of the play are here,
In a storm of light; birthday; at any moment.
Full in their powers, and the voice of waking
Sings for beginnings; she sings, wherever waking is.
Wherever the de
ep moon stands, the song arrives.
Nevertheless the moon goes voyages.
Nevertheless, the journeying is time:
Makes birthdays, makes this birthday a resonance
And the remote boundaries of imagining
Acknowledge the voices, her daily human voice,
Blessing this birthday moment her monument.
Deep in the waking, her life builds in light
The vision of the body of the soul.
DIVINING WATER
We stood around the raw new-planted garden
Parables green and yellow in the ground
The old man with his branch paced the diagonal
The rare Negro girl accepted a forked branch
And paced her line The corners of an ancient
Dance-figure now we were as we stood watching
Everything was there in the moment there
Random and light in the dance on young grass flaming up
While the old man held his branch and walked toward water
Walked to that moment where the branch dives down
We stood in the moment random funny rare
Everything here and everything contained
In a strong diving a diving of the swan's strong neck
Diving of prayer leaping to find deep under
Reason and rock the cold sweet-driven springs
Everything being here in the moment here
Belief and disbelief the dry light on the grass
And the old man with lit eyes
Calculations of willow, predictions done in peach-branch
Dancing of the young dark over wellwater
The way we guess where lies the buried life
But not for days after the eyes and dance
Did the deep fountain show Do they divine each other?
The man drove true the moment was all water
And time the branch drove and the hand of man
It shines awake it glitters on the grass
Now waters divine man we all know what he was
2 Translations: Octavio Paz
[UNTITLED]
The hand of day opens
Three clouds
Becoming a few words
[UNTITLED]
At daybreak go looking for your newborn name
Over the thrones of sleep glittering the light
Gallops across all mountains to the sea
The sun with his spurs on is entering the waves
Stony attack breaking the clarities
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 37
