Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

by Janet Kaufman

  For the meaning of “mirror of nature,” the meaning of “image

  of God”

  Is a simple fiery meaning : man is to create.

  Making, singing, bring the potential to day.

  [UNTITLED]

  A tree of rivers flowing through our lives;

  These lives moving through their starvation and greatness,

  Masked away from each other, masked in lack.

  Each woman seen as a river through whom lifetime

  Gives, and feeds. Each man seen giving and feeding.

  Under all the images, under all growth and form. The energy

  of each, which is relation,

  A flare of linked fire which is the need to grow,

  The human wish for meaning.

  Roots of diversity

  Each being witness to itself, entering to relate,

  Bearing the flood, the food, the becoming of power,

  Which is our eyes and our lives

  Related, in bonds of flow.

  [UNTITLED]

  The sea has opened, the limit of his dream

  Has split; now lights announce him to the day.

  He is born; and asleep, awake, and soon the warm

  Taste of the second world calls him to understand

  Power drawn on the tides of sweetness in.

  His strength allowing change, letting him choose and grow

  Again, and the curve of the world is breast, the breathing land

  With his own breathing tells of peace and form.

  Not now, but much later, does the world fall away.

  This is myself, says the child. My self, we all did say.

  There is my mother, whose pleasure, whose deep need

  It was to feed me singing, or recoil.

  And then the fable, the terrible forgetting.

  A cold distortion twisting past the leaves.

  Was there a Garden? Was there a Tree of Sin?

  What was my exile but from memory?

  Refusal, flowering, was the only tree.

  It grew until the truth was almost lost.

  Cast, the obliterate spirit sang its loss.

  Dream and the sea open.

  All things find their change.

  The child remembers : the child is the tree;

  The tides, the leaves, the city, the true relation.

  The world was the mother, the world; it was always the world

  Pure, fierce, all moving and all reconciled.

  POWERPLANT

  A structure is rising. It takes on shape, it takes on meaning

  Where there was formless waste. Go down the valley,

  Eye of creation, sings the voice of the girl

  Through cloverfield. Green water is the spring of the year,

  Jade green in summer; autumn bright blue, for winter water-black.

  The wall's detail, discrimination of blue

  Standing above the wall, where developing water

  Coils, sheathes, transforms itself turning, into light.

  Fusing of images and further change.

  Fire and music, interchangeable.

  Fusing of flow, dividing and further blue.

  There is control here, for all things in relation

  Find their offerings and give. A tendency toward life.

  The man at peace with his life and its flashing,

  A climax forest at peace with its fields.

  When the storms come, there is something in us

  That has always been ready to greet the storm.

  An impulse running through a valley of process

  Quickens the blossoming, whose orange on evening

  The fiery action of men and women emerges.

  And daughter-stars, daughter-forests of our range

  Dance with the central prince the dance of reign.

  We know the light incarnate, we have seen

  At last that the flashing is our old light, and flesh.

  Under stones, under leaves, under links of purpose,

  Appetite up so tall, the power is given

  Along the hillsides of risk, the spiral dances

  Within its own symmetry. But women, but men, but women

  And men in the dances and risks of birth

  In which love and the spirit are reborn.

  This also from lightning given and growing power.

  Lightning which is the word. The gift and power. Love.

  [UNTITLED]

  In the last hour of night, a zebra racing dawn,

  Black-and-white hour that feeds the night and the light,

  Feeding the strong infants; when the well is open;

  When all the birds of day begin to sing.

  He turning in sleep finds through a journey of dream

  One woman in whom all the rivers of his storm

  Cluster and fill, as words, as woman. Finds

  The running of stones in a riverbed

  Troubling hillsides with their leaves

  Over black branches. Swinging-to of mountains

  No heavier than sails riding to rendezvous.

  Dense in our blood, abstract as the idea of God.

  As smoky misereres, as the birthcry.

  The big few clusters, the body of a man.

  The clusters of her body. Sleep of gardens,

  Sleep of rain, always distant and present

  As your own deprived childhood. No. Not deprived.

  Yes. For it never saw it was deprived.

  But there was the unknown, the great dream of the poor

  And of all men; your childhood found that friend.

  Was it the faceless, the man in the purple graveyard?

  No. Hidden. And kind. In endless offering.

  And now in early sleep, a ripple uncovering

  The roots of the diverse, the city of love.

  A note in music. His sleep going long and along.

  FIELDS WHERE WE SLEPT

  Fields where we slept

  Lie underwater now

  Clay meadows of nightmare

  Beneath the shallow wave.

  A tremor of speech

  On all lips and all mirrors,

  Pink sweater and tornado

  Act out the spiral dawn.

  South lies evocative

  On one fine Negro mouth.

  Play of silver in streams

  Half lake under.

  High on the unplowed red

  And waterweeds respond

  Where Sheriff Fever

  Ordered me to trial,

  Where once hatred and fear

  Touched me the branch of death,

  I may float waves of making

  Hung above my lost field.

  Remember they say and Incarnatus Est,

  The fire-tailed waves, never forget the eyes

  Of the distorted jailers or their kindness

  Even while they were torturing Mr. Crystal.

  Psalms awake and asleep, remember the manmade

  Lake where those barren treecrowns rode.

  Where air of curses hung, keel of my calm

  Rides our created tide.

  PORTRAIT OF A MAN, WITH A BACKGROUND OF HOLDINGS

  Standing against the gorge, he sees the slides of light.

  Where lightning lay, they are building. The surfaces are lit.

  The dam that is almost finished stands in seamless night

  Declaring its form with a clear speaking.

  The man leans on his railing. He thinks : I will listen.

  Bulbs of violent light swing on their own wires,

  Lines of the downstream face flow down the slope of dream.

  Spillway of loyalties shining, the gate of fire.

  He forgets the police on a hot summer night long past

  Later finding the wound between his shoulder blades;

  He thinks of the women opened before him, flowers of summer,

  The first cry of his son at which all waterfalls

  Waited like streams of wine bi
tter in Spain.

  Riches of breathing, fantastic poverty.

  The running of stones in this riverbed.

  Corngreen and fields of thirst, he thinks. I know a woman

  The river of whose mouth, whose sea of flowers

  I saw in the hot fields of the past, at night.

  Over all images a lightning stroke of law

  Has been laid across, white structure on the river

  To stop my profit's streams, to make a tree

  Celebrating the years of growth and form.

  The pacemaker image. A pulse and pattern of light.

  The mirror image of my waste, in the ferocious cities

  Whose roaring and giant fibres find my exultation

  Outward in the shout, while what I stare at is

  The dam I tried to murder for years; or sail

  In a boat the color of violins among

  A school of condoms floating in the Sound.

  Beyond naming, waste! The legs of the withered man.

  My summons from the great web and the woman

  In glimpses accepted, for long forgot. I think

  I am wheat dormant in the seedman's hand.

  [UNTITLED]

  A red bridge fastening this city to the forest,

  Telling relationship in a stroke of steel;

  Cloud-hung among the mist it speaks the real,

  In the morning of need asserts the purest

  Of our connections : for the opposites

  To call direct, to be the word that goes,

  Glowing from fires of thought to thought's dense snows,

  Growing among the treason and the threats.

  Between the summer strung and the young city,

  Linking the stonefall to the treefall slope,

  Beyond the old namings of body and mind

  A red bridge building a new-made identity:

  Communion of love opened to cross and find

  Self the enemy, this moment and our hope.

  [UNTITLED]

  Power never dominion.

  Some other power.

  Some force flaking in light, avalanches of lilies,

  Days and the sun renewed in semen, pure

  Among the uncorrupted fires, fire's ancestor,

  Forgotten; worshipped secretly;

  Where the vestigial Lucifer regales

  Craters of memory; where leans

  Some fleshly girl, the shaped stones of desire

  Leaping in color at her human cunt.

  They will translate this girl. She will appear

  In textbooks as a sacrificed antelope

  Guilt running shiny over the short fur.

  Ideas of shame did split that throat.

  But none of that is true tonight.

  The girl was leaning over the crater, I dreamt it,

  The shriveled flowers twisted in her hair,

  And jewels budded at her throat.

  The girl of choice, remembering the past fires,

  Praising the word, the columns in the grove,

  Arbor vitae uterinae

  Locked by such branches, light in the dense forest,

  Praising the world unknown and feeling beat

  Among her branches

  A human child.

  Brambles of sense! and that responding power

  Rocking the fullness of time.

  Until it shall be, what never was:

  River and born and dream.

  Canals of music downward serenade

  New satin gleams under her haunches;

  And, running laterally,

  And backwards across ripples,

  Passing the lower stairs,

  Even above the unforgettable murmur,

  The sound of oars.

  Body of the splendid, bear me now!

  Completed by orbits of unhorsèd comets,

  The bronze, paternal stars.

  Cave of their messengers,

  Thalamic cleft where the divorcèd myth

  Begged to be nursed through hysteria that leap year,

  Sank at the window—O the famous view!

  This side or that side of the balcony

  Falling, the graceless sanatorium swan,

  Breaking nobody's kneecaps but her own.

  Passes the pear orchard near the middle hill

  At the wind's moment when all sails are lowered,

  A small bird kiares, slope of his flight, the blue

  Yielding flutes of his feathers, that small wing

  Bounds us above—kiar! Inscribing our horizon.

  A high note over our necessity.

  [UNTITLED]

  The sky is as black as it was when you lay down

  But it is shining; the setting constellations

  Are under now. You fell asleep listening.

  Yes, you are off the road. But showers of fire

  Are running through night, and now your daybreak eyes

  Remember the forest and the invisible city,

  You will always know what there is loose in the world,

  God of your early morning childhood and your dreams,

  Visible sparkling in these women and men.

  That you can learn alone and by loving them

  That act through all things seeming unstill or still

  And turns your painful spirit to face the light.

  [UNTITLED]

  On your journey you will come to a time of waking.

  The others may be asleep. Or you may be alone.

  Immediacy of song moving the titled

  Visions of children and the linking stars.

  You will begin then to remember. You

  Hear the voice relating after late listening.

  You remember even falling asleep, or a dream of sleep.

  For now the song is given and you remember.

  At every clear waking you have known this song,

  The cities of this music identified

  By the white springs of singing, and their fountains

  Reflected in windows, in all the human eyes.

  The wishes, the need growing. The song growing.

  [UNTITLED]

  This is the net of begetting and belief :

  The laws of relation, of seed, urging all things to form

  Through growth which develops on the dreams of law

  The waking of each day, the theatres of the night

  Afford us responsibility, the king and queen

  Of fire in its running through all things.

  Our only rest is in going with our meanings

  In life and holiness,

  All the creative acts drawing from the deep source

  Their air of wildness and peace,

  Their blessing and energy,

  Making forever the world.

  BODY OF WAKING

  Fire-thread in the valley. Bird-voice in darkness.

  Before the opening of the world. In our own time.

  Days we then heard the cities in their singing,

  Armies standing in their graves imagining certain mornings,

  Hours a naked man in the stream high on the mountain

  Imagined this, too, among the cold water,

  Looking up at the forming sky.

  Century of absence in the valley of confusion.

  When you wake, even startled awake, even in shadowless night, even

  alone, the song

  Will be growing. The song begun will be growing in fiery night ; in

  blackness, voices

  Pouring over the unseen cities, and the mountains wake,

  Riverlands unseen, immediacy of song.

  Silence prepares the sleepers. Silence prepares

  Our night of the dark branches of the world.

  Century of absence. It could be like a time

  When the soul that has slept leaps from its priests,

  Spring when the old idea is at last available to all children,

  And God in the world is on the lips of love.

 
Hot out of the dried blood of the separate churches,

  The nations, separate wards in the same hospital.

  Revenge which spikes the cross and splits the star

  Withers the crescent. The world circles among

  The solitude of Spain, the solitude of Stalingrad,

  Solitude in the hills of loess and the caves of Africa,

  And now your solitude, New York, who raised yourself above.

  Now the buried questions flicker on all faces.

  Does the flat belly know its heart is broken?

  Do you drag yourself through the wilderness saying

  Never mind how we got here; that will come later?

  Much later, after you speak of the weapon birds

  And the spies in your milk and the little split children

  Bleeding models of cars; you told their fortunes

  According to a harvest of slot-machines;

  According to the obscene pattern of bombers.

  Much later, after you glare for eight days, silent,

  After you howl for a century and a half,

  You look at the clock and see it has not moved.

  What do you do then? Weep for the generations?

  You change your life. No. You begin again

  Going on from the moment in which you stand today.

  Will there be suffering? Perhaps not as much as now.

  But there will be suffering, in the healing? Yes.

  Only with a difference. You will know it then.

  Walking down Basin Street, will be aware.

  And that, my darling, my dear dear, is what Mother prays for,

  Beside the cradle, lighting the candles of the days,

  In retreat, in the kitchen, watching by living bodies

  And waiting endlessly by the unmoving face

  While the door is still not, not really, not yet, opened.

  My darling, my baby, my people, my own self.

  The words rising from the sleep of America:

  I had all my children, and they locked themselves in,

  My babies are sick to death, and the doctor is not well.

  Ruddy we are, strong we are, and insane.

  They built doors around themselves, and then they locked the doors.

  Some believe they are doctors. Some believe they are patients,

  Some think they are statisticians. Some are ambassadors.

  We eat very well. We keep the pictures on.

  Sometimes the clocks jump fifty minutes. Some days they do not