But without anything
Breath
Breath of the fire love
Smoke of the poems voices
WATERLILY FIRE
for Richard Griffith
1 THE BURNING
Girl grown woman fire mother of fire
I go to the stone street turning to fire. Voices
Go screaming Fire to the green glass wall.
And there where my youth flies blazing into fire
The dance of sane and insane images, noon
Of seasons and days. Noontime of my one hour.
Saw down the bright noon street the crooked faces
Among the tall daylight in the city of change.
The scene has walls stone glass all my gone life
One wall a web through which the moment walks
And I am open, and the opened hour
The world as water-garden lying behind it.
In a city of stone, necessity of fountains,
Forced water fallen on glass, men with their axes.
An arm of flame reaches from water-green glass,
Behind the wall I know waterlilies
Drinking their light, transforming light and our eyes
Skythrown under water, clouds under those flowers,
Walls standing on all things stand in a city noon
Who will not believe a waterlily fire.
Whatever can happen in a city of stone,
Whatever can come to a wall can come to this wall.
I walk in the river of crisis toward the real,
I pass guards, finding the center of my fear
And you, Dick, endlessly my friend during storm.
The arm of flame striking through the wall of form.
2 THE ISLAND
Born of this river and this rock island, I relate
The changes : I born when the whirling snow
Rained past the general's grave and the amiable child
White past the windows of the house of Gyp the Blood.
General, gangster, child. I know in myself the island.
I was the island without bridges, the child down whose blazing
Eye the men of plumes and bone raced their canoes and fire
Among the building of my young childhood, houses;
I was those changes, the live darknesses
Of wood, the pale grain of a grove in the fields
Over the river fronting red cliffs across—
And always surrounding her the river, birdcries, the wild
Father building his sand, the mother in panic her parks—
Bridges were thrown across, the girl arose
From sleeping streams of change in the change city.
The violent forgetting, the naked sides of darkness.
Fountain of a city in growth, an island of light and water.
Snow striking up past the graves, the yellow cry of spring.
Whatever can come to a city can come to this city.
Under the tall compulsion
of the past
I see the city
change like a man changing
I love this man
with my lifelong body of love
I know you
among your changes
wherever I go
Hearing the sounds of building
the syllables of wrecking
A young girl watching
the man throwing red hot rivets
Coals in a bucket of change
How can you love a city that will not stay?
I love you
like a man of life in change.
Leaves like yesterday shed, the yellow of green spring
Like today accepted and become one's self
I go, I am a city with bridges and tunnels,
Rock, cloud, ships, voices. To the man where the river met
The tracks, now buried deep along the Drive
Where blossoms like sex pink, dense pink, rose, pink, red.
Towers falling. A dream of towers.
Necessity of fountains. And my poor,
Stirring among our dreams,
Poor of my own spirit, and tribes, hope of towers
And lives, looking out through my eyes.
The city the growing body of our hate and love,
The root of the soul, and war in its black doorways.
A male sustained cry interrupting nightmare.
Male flower heading upstream.
Among a city of light, the stone that grows.
Stigma of dead stone, inert water, the tattered
Monuments rivetted against flesh.
Blue noon where the wall made big agonized men
Stand like sailors pinned howling on their lines, and I
See stopped in time a crime behind green glass,
Lilies of all my life on fire.
Flash faith in a city building its fantasies.
I walk past the guards into my city of change.
3 JOURNEY CHANGES
Many of us Each in his own life waiting
Waiting to move Beginning to move Walking
And early on the road of the hill of the world
Come to my landscapes emerging on the grass
The stages of the theatre of the journey
I see the time of willingness between plays
Waiting and walking and the play of the body
Silver body with its bosses and places
One by one touched awakened into into
Touched and turned one by one into flame
The theatre of the advancing goddess Blossoming
Smiles as she stands intensely being in stillness
Slowness in her blue dress advancing standing I go
And far across a field over the jewel grass
The play of the family stroke by stroke acted out
Gestures of deep acknowledging on the journey stages
Of the playings the play of the goddess and the god
A supple god of searching and reaching
Who weaves his strength Who dances her more alive
The theatre of all animals, my snakes, my great horses
Always the journey long patient many haltings
Many waitings for choice and again easy breathing
When the decision to go on is made
Along the long slopes of choice and again the world
The play of poetry approaching in its solving
Solvings of relations in poems and silences
For we were born to express born for a journey
Caves, theatres, the companioned solitary way
And then I came to the place of mournful labor
A turn in the road and the long sight from the cliff
Over the scene of the land dug away to nothing and many
Seen to a stripped horizon carrying barrows of earth
A hod of earth taken and emptied and thrown away
Repeated farther than sight. The voice saying slowly
But it is hell. I heard my own voice in the words
Or it could be a foundation And after the words
My chance came. To enter. The theatres of the world.
4 FRAGILE
I think of the image brought into my room
Of the sage and the thin young man who flickers and asks.
He is asking about the moment when the Buddha
Offers the lotus, a flower held out as declaration.
“Isn't that fragile?” he asks. The sage answers:
“I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?”
5 THE LONG BODY
This journey is exploring us. Where the child stood
An island in a river of crisis, now
The bridges bind us in symbol, the sea
Is a bond, the sky reaches into our bodies.
We pray : we dive into each other's eyes.
Whatever can come to a woman can come to me.
This is the long body : into life from the beginning,
Big-headed infant unfolding into child, who stretches and finds
And then flowing the young one going tall, sunward,
And now full-grown, held, tense, setting feet to the ground,
Going as we go in the changes of the body,
As it is changes, in the long strip of our many
Shapes, as we range shifting through time.
The long body : a procession of images.
This moment in a city, in its dream of war.
We chose to be,
Becoming the only ones under the trees
when the harsh sound
Of the machine sirens spoke. There were these two men,
And the bearded one, the boys, the Negro mother feeding
Her baby. And threats, the ambulances with open doors.
Now silence. Everyone else within the walls. We sang.
We are the living island,
We the flesh of this island, being lived,
Whoever knows us is part of us today.
Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
Fire striking its word among us, waterlilies
Reaching from darkness upward to a sun
Of rebirth, the implacable. And in our myth
The Changing Woman who is still and who offers.
Eyes drinking light, transforming light, this day
That struggles with itself, brings itself to birth.
In ways of being, through silence, sources of light
Arriving behind my eye, a dialogue of light.
And everything a witness of the buried life.
This moment flowing across the sun, this force
Of flowers and voices body in body through space.
The city of endless cycles of the sun.
I speak to you You speak to me
The Speed of Darkness
1968
1 Clues
THE POEM AS MASK
ORPHEUS
When I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness,
it was a mask,
on their mountain, god-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone
down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from
myself.
There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory
of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued child
beside me among the doctors, and a word
of rescue from the great eyes.
No more masks! No more mythologies!
Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me with their own music.
WHAT DO I GIVE YOU?
What do I give you? This memory
I cannot give you. Force of a memory
I cannot give you : it rings my nerves among.
None of these songs
Are made in their images.
Seeds of all memory
Given me give I you
My own self. Voice of my days.
Blessing; the seed and pain,
Green of the praise of growth.
The sacred body of thirst.
THE TRANSGRESS
That summer midnight under her aurora
northern and still we passed the barrier.
Two make a curse, one giving, one accepting.
It takes two to break a curse
transformed at last in each other's eyes.
I sat on the naked bed of space,
all things becoming other than what they seem
in the night-waking, in the revelation
thundering on tabu after the broken
imperative, while the grotesque ancestors fade
with you breathing beside me through our dream:
bed of forbidden things finally known—
art from the symbol struck, living and made.
Branch lifted green from the dead shock of stone.
THE CONJUGATION OF THE PARAMECIUM
This has nothing
to do with
propagating
The species
is continued
as so many are
(among the smaller creatures)
by fission
(and this species
is very small
next in order to
the amoeba, the beginning one)
The paramecium
achieves, then,
immortality
by dividing
But when
the paramecium
desires renewal
strength another joy
this is what
the paramecium does:
The paramecium
lies down beside
another
paramecium
Slowly inexplicably
the exchange
takes place
in which
some bits
of the nucleus of each
are exchanged
for some bits
of the nucleus
of the other
This is called
the conjugation of the paramecium.
JUNK-HEAP AT MURANO
for Joby West
You told me : they all went in and saw the glass,
The tourists, and I with them, a busload of them,
a boatload
Out from Venice. We saw the glass making.
Until I, longing for air—longing for something—walked
outside
And found my way along the building and around.
Suddenly there the dazzle, all the colors, fireworks and
jewels in a mound
Flashing from the heap of glass thrown away. Not quite
perfect. Perhaps a little flawed. Chipped, perhaps.
Here is one.
And handed me the blue.
I looked into your eyes
Who walked around Murano
And I saw far behind, the face of the child I carried outdoors
that night.
You were four. You looked up into the great tree netting
all of night
And saw fire-points in the tree, and asked, “Do birds eat
stars?”
Behind your eyes the seasons, the times,
assemble; dazzle; are here.
CLUES
How will you catch these clues at the moment of waking
take them, make them yours? Wake, do you,
and light the lamp of sharpest whitest beam
and write them down in the room of night on white—
night opening and opening white
paper under white light, write what streamed
from you in darkness
into you by dark?
Indian Baptiste saying, We painted our dreams.
We painted our dreams on our faces and bodies.
We took them into us by painting them on ourselves.
When we saw the water mystery of the lake
after the bad dream, we painted the lines and masks,
when the bear wounded me, I painted for healing.
When we were told in our dreams, in the colors of day
red for earth, black for the opposite, rare green, white.
Yellow. When I dreamed of weeping and dreamed of sorrow
I painted my face with tears, with joy.
Our ghost paintings and our dreams of war.
The whole brow, the streak, the hands and sex, the breast.
The spot of white, one hand black, one hand red.
The morning star appearing over the hill.
We took our dreams into our selves.
We took our dreams into our bodies.
IN OUR TIME
In our period, they say there is free speech.
They say there is no penalty for poets,
There is no penalty for writi
ng poems.
They say this. This is the penalty.
DOUBLE DIALOGUE:
HOMAGE TO ROBERT FROST
In agony saying : “The last night of his life,
My son and I in the kitchen : At half-past one
He said, ‘I have failed as a husband. Now my wife
Is ill again and suffering.’ At two
He said, ‘I have failed as a farmer, for the sun
Is never there, the rain is never there.’
At three he said, ‘I have failed as a poet who
Has never not once found my listener.
There is no sense to my life.’ But then he heard me out.
I argued point by point. Seemed to win. Won.
He spoke to me once more when I was done:
‘Even in argument, father, I have lost.’
He went and shot himself. Now tell me this one thing:
Should I have let him win then? Was I wrong?”
To answer for the land for love for song
Arguing life for life even at your life's cost.
THE SIX CANONS
after Binyon
Seize structure.
Correspond with the real.
Fuse spirit and matter.
Know your own secrets.
Announce your soul in discovery.
Go toward the essence, the impulse of creation,
where power comes in music from the sex,
where power comes in music from the spirit,
where sex and spirit are one self
passing among
and acting on all things
and their relationships,
moving the constellations of all things.
FORERUNNERS
Forerunners of images.
In morning, on the river-mouth,
I came to my waking
seeing carried in air
seaward, a ship.
Standing on stillness
before the bowsprit
the man of spirit
—lookout aloft, steersman at wheel, silence on water—
and the young graceful man holding the lily iron.
I dream of all harpooning and the sea.
Out of Seville, after Holy Week I heard the
story of the black carriage and a lordly woman.
Her four daughters, their skirts of black foam,
lace seethed about them; drawn by four horses,
reined in, their black threads in the coachman's hands.
Far ahead on invisible wire
a circus horse making his shapes on the air.
Between us forever enlarges Spain and the war.
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 42
