Move.
Some play they are parents. Some always are the children.
We are careful to flush the toilet. Of course we take exercise.
Of course it's a toilet. Of course it's a swimming pool.
The force that split the spirit could found a city,
That held the split could shine the lights of science.
This rigid energy could still break and run dancing
Over the rockies and smokies of all lives.
How many moons circle our dreams? America,
Did you think only of wars and luxury?
Can you remember your early dreaming?
Who of us fully living
Among these inward murders,
Among the ritual
Of domination?
I remember the structure of towers
Torches over New York
I remember the structure of crystals
A single sheet of flow
I know an immortal journey
And we all walk hypnotized by a cliff
Speed and explosion.
Voices of process, river of human meanings.
Put your hand in, come into the dance,
Turn around fine, take out your hand,
Dance yourself once.
You know this music.
You were born among these songs.
No we tell, sing, and relate.
The buried life and the body of waking.
Bird-voice in darkness. Tremor of night moving.
The rocks accept blackness. Now I remember trees.
Across the crystals of time forming I suddenly feel
The flow of a cold breeze following a bird-voice
The river remade, the invitation of water
Moving in praise of process.
In time the river turns, in time turn the wakers
Among their colored dreams,
In time our frightful processions
May turn toward morning and turn toward form.
Now the praise of the moving into light,
The melody of this walking, the broken breathing even of us
Who moved to discover the children in the forest,
The children of our own dreams who would save us.
Even among our broken failing years
And the acts to bind us, the look between two faces,
Ways and grace,
The melody of praise and the whisper of green
Before the opening of the world,
In our own time.
That was long before we knew what was required,
Before we began ever to hear the questions.
But the young, talking together of growth and form,
Arrived once more at the terms. In praise of process,
Our songs were, of the seed; we took the joy
Of the eye dancing unborn, its precise fore-lighting
Moving in unborn dark toward the achieved gaze,
Seeking continually developing light.
Seeking as we began to grow, and resting without distrust,
We moved toward a requirement still unknown.
We spoke of the heroes, the generous ones, who gave their meanings,
Knowing again meaning as music,
Meaning in all its moving, as process, as song,
As the enlightened seed transformed in dark and light.
Color transformed us. We knew the dance of selves,
Growing, meaning giving us our green.
And toward a future the music goes.
Flashing of meaning as the light we breathe,
And through the whole night moving, coming as music.
Music that grows in silence, along dark a single voice
On its long stair of sound going up darkness
Moving toward form, moving becoming meaning
That makes our sleeping.
Silent
Until the river under the voice discovers
Its own currents, a flowing in a stream.
While air follows its own music.
Throat of song. The air-achieving bird
Sings in the blackness.
Hours past midnight and a throat of music,
The dark night offering.
Fleet of voices in a single turning
Stair of calling and the flying pauses
Go as darkness and grow as constellations.
Voices of all music going toward its form
In human meanings and in silences.
Arriving again as the weather of our days
Over born water, on waking faces.
Growing to feed each other, lover, mother of gesture
To turn against fear and withholden reach,
The movement at the center of all things
Making a stillness never a refusal.
Dream and creation and sea,
Violent precise act,
Movement to match our lives,
Wish at the center of growth
We feel as peace.
Peace the love of the process of our lives
For the movement at the center of all things.
Voice diving deep.
Deep in the lights of silence.
When night no longer imagines sunlight,
And we going darker come to all music,
Deep in the clearoscure, where we alone
And all alone go through the texture of time
To the flowing present that becomes all things,
The energy of myth and star and bone.
Now the heroes of process
Not leaders but lives
Is even the lost girl walking the length of the forest
Even the child whose January wrists
Stuck out below his blowing sleeves. Weeping, he was,
Along the avenue. And the man who faced the spies
At the Segre River. Long ago. In Spain.
Another image of the born, the next woman,
Another image of the next power of man
Finds itself dreaming in the world of form.
Entering, long before we enter,
The new requirement, the world of morning.
Here's day beginning, the blessed, the unbegun, the song, the given.
For that the human wish to grow acts through his giving
The living will be giving you your doors and apples.
Self torn from its old lies, walking and eating,
Becoming music and bone,
All incomplete without the rest
And powerful over time
No longer cruel in partial truth,
Knowledge of giving and taking
Enters now and lets us live.
Lets us arrive at the present when the world
Has the choice of each of us, to make life or suicide,
To give or die.
They have eluded us. They are not here.
Statues turning to cloud among the music
Float overhead, promising rain and seasons
In the black, the day in midnight.
Dayray before the way.
Rides on a flickering breath, the changes of darkness,
Exchange of murders. Bodies exchanging life.
Where the belief flows somewhere
Uncorrupt, hidden, under violence,
Making its own and dawn-announcing act,
River of daybreak, where the waking is,
Still to be sung among the deaths and days.
These meanings become the light we breathe,
The breathing of a theme; in our own time.
[UNTITLED]
Sounds of night in the country of the opposites.
Music for the first time, on incredible instruments:
The rapids of a river, a woman's kitchen stove,
A village crossroads with its forgotten language;
Clank and chuckle of gambling; one line of a song;
The strings of lost limitless time. Music.
Voice of a cat you knew b
efore you learned to speak.
Voices of waterfalls, steel whirls, many small flowers,
Voices of a dream of the animals of heaven
Raised through the hungering
Of some one thin wavering unransomed boy
In starved and golden air.
A sheer black music, rare-lit joining of waters.
Night-sound in the country of the opposites.
WILLKIE IN THE GULLIVER
When after the screens of the evening of defeat
You try the remote clean air, withdrawal, think of him.
He was like many of us. He had lost.
He flew to the many, making a crisis of choice
Lead toward the solving of barriers; learning, flying, crossed
Level after level of process, where we come
To ourselves, to the voiceless many who never in time
Choose against life. We find the direct voice.
Remembering limits, in the days of death,
All the faring that follows our first sight of the face
Of all things beginning again past deepest defeat.
Think now all of us of our loved and great,
Traveling new to make human the bonds of breath
After defeat; for all men; by God's grace.
[UNTITLED]
Then full awake you will recognize the voice,
You will know pouring through your journey
Bird-voice, voices of crystal, human voice
Whose body is your love
Opening the valleys of your love.
Dreaming we were awake, we saw the clusters
Moving, and the swarm of crystal forming, faces
Spiked down by stars who could not speak their bonds.
And forgot. And forget. Averted our souls. Forgot.
All I can promise if you go your journey
Is that you will come to a place of fire
And a place of night and then another place
Nobody now alive has ever predicted.
The gate of that place is water. It is called Process.
But on the way to the place, I saw a tower,
The children took me to it, and there the old men
Stood on the high rim. But the tower was hollow.
Within was a pit as deep as the tower was high.
Whatever arose, arose from the depth of the pit.
The name of the tower was The Place of Praise.
When you reach the place, will you live forever?
Surely not. You will leave again, often. You will forget,
In rigid afternoons, a power of flowing. But now
You will remember again, again return, and find
Again that changing fire, that changing
Water, that waking, and your self, and all men.
[UNTITLED]
In your time, there have been those who spoke clearly
For the moment of lightning.
Were we all brave, but at different times?
Even raped open and split, even anonymous,
They spoke. They are not forgotten.
But they are. In late summer; forgot; caught at cross-purposes,
Interrupted in an hour of purity,
Their lives careening along in the fierce cities,
Through atrocious poverties and magnificence,
The unforgotten, the early gone forgot.
Late daytime, and nothing left to hide but an eye endowed
With the charred, guilty, gouged by war, the raging splendor;
Despised like you, criminal in intent; sunburnt, in love and
splendid;
This heart, naked and knocking, going in clouds,
Smoke and a cry of light.
In pain, the voice of pain. The shadow of your cry.
And never forget : you are magnificent beyond all colors.
HE HAD A QUALITY OF GROWTH
No one ever walking this our only earth, various, very clouded,
in our forests, in all the valleys of our early dreams,
No one has ever for long seen any thing in full, not live
As any one river or man has run his changes, child
Of the swarms and sowings. Death nor the woman, seed
Of the born, all growing, going through the grass.
However deep you have looked into the well of the cradle
Or into any dream or open eyed the grave
While the soul, many-leaved and waiting,
Began to assume another exact flower.
Smoke and smell in the wind, a single life!
However true you tell, you never have told.
And even that is not altogether true. It changes, we say,
changes, for yes,
Indeed we all know this, any, any of us, there are secrets known
to all.
Was it indeed shown you in a flash of journey, the flicker along
change?
In the fine shadow between the curve of lips, shadow of days
lengthening,
In the flicker of meaning revealed by many windows;
In the form of the eye, the form of words, of the word; meaning that formed
These marvelous genitals, nameless as God;
Or in the informing light behind his dream, and he was dreaming of you.
Did his own self escape him, now to reach us, reaving the edge of cloud?
Has a gift then been given, each other giving our lives?
As air is given to the mouth of all?
ARE YOU BORN?—2
A child riding the stormy mane of noon
Sang to me past the cloud of the world:
Are you born? Are you born?
The form of this hope is the law of all things,
Our foaming sun is the toy of that force.
Touch us alive, developing light! Today,
Revealed over the mountains, every living eyes.
Child of the possible, who rides the hour
Of dream and process, lit by every fire.
Glittering blood of song, a man who changed
And hardly changed, only flickered, letting pass
A glint of time, showers of human meanings
Flashing upon us all : his story and his song.
The song of a child; the song of the cloud of the world,
Born, born, born. Cloud became real,
and change,
The starry form of love.
Waterlily Fire
1962
THE SPEAKING TREE
for Robert Payne
Great Alexander sailing was from his true course turned
By a young wind from a cloud in Asia moving
Like a most recognizable most silvery woman;
Tall Alexander to the island came.
The small breeze blew behind his turning head.
He walked the foam of ripples into this scene.
The trunk of the speaking tree looks like a tree-trunk
Until you look again. Then people and animals
Are ripening on the branches; the broad leaves
Are leaves; pale horses, sharp fine foxes
Blossom; the red rabbit falls
Ready and running. The trunk coils, turns,
Snakes, fishes. Now the ripe people fall and run,
Three of them in their shore-dance, flames that stand
Where reeds are creatures and the foam is flame.
Stiff Alexander stands. He cannot turn.
But he is free to turn : this is the speaking tree,
It calls your name. It tells us what we mean.
TO ENTER THAT RHYTHM WHERE THE SELF IS LOST
To enter that rhythm where the self is lost,
where breathing : heartbeat : and the subtle music
of their relation make our dance, and hasten
us to the moment when all things become
magic, another possibility.
That blind moment, midnight, when all sight
begins, a
nd the dance itself is all our breath,
and we ourselves the moment of life and death.
Blinded; but given now another saving,
the self as vision, at all times perceiving,
all arts all senses being languages,
delivered of will, being transformed in truth—
for life's sake surrendering moment and images,
writing the poem; in love making; bringing to birth.
FOR A MEXICAN PAINTER
Carlos, your art is embryos,
These eyes are shaping in the dark;
There is a fate map in this red
Line and that bright red line,
The earliest map of all.
These eyes are shaping in the dark
Toward the requirement of light
And all will grow as they have grown;
Even transplanted will perform
Selfwise, themselves, this one, that one.
Deep in the hieratic blood
Toward sleep toward dream the process goes,
Toward waking move the sex, the heart,
The self as woman man and rose.
Carlos, your art is embryos.
A SONG OF ANOTHER TRIBE
Guilt said the bony man
Do you feel guilt
At your desires?
No I said my guilt comes when
My desires find no way.
Country of sand and claws;
I wait for my rescuer.
No one will venture there.
Out of long silences
Come I to wordless song
O let my singing bring me
To that place
Where live waters
Rise and go.
There may the living arrive,
Go and return.
Find me, and I find,
And go finding.
A beating sound, I hear
A sound of riding.
Speed after silence
And at last music,
Words of another tribe:
My riding is on swift mares,
My love is by the green water-springs;
For a short moment I will sit there,
I will look upon her wandering face,
I will put an end to the black delay.
SONG
A voice flew out of the river as morning flew
out of the body of night, a voice sending
out from the night of the sleeping
Morning : a voice in its own voice, naked, made
of the whole body and the whole life
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 41
