Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

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Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 44

by Janet Kaufman


  to go, to grow, to flow, to shine, to sound, to glow,

  to give and to take, to bind and to separate,

  to injure and to defend

  we do not even not even know why we wake

  but some of us showing the others

  a kind of welcoming

  bringing a form to morning

  as a woman who recognizes

  may offer us the moment and the names

  turning all shame into a declaration

  immediately to be followed by

  an act of truth

  until all seemings are

  illumination

  we see in a man a theme

  a dream taking over

  or in this woman going today who has shown us

  fear, and form, and storm turned into light

  the dailiness of our being and doing

  morning and every time the way to naming

  and we see more now coming into being

  see in her goings as in her arrivings

  the opening of a door

  SONG FROM PUCK FAIR

  Torrent that rushes down

  Knocknadober,

  Make the channel deeper

  Where I ferry home.

  Winds go west over

  Left-handed Reaper

  Mountain that gathered me

  Out of my old shame—

  Your white beard streaming,

  Puck of summertime,

  At last gave me

  My woman's name.

  NOT YET

  A time of destruction. Of the most rigid powers in ascendance.

  Secret plots against them, open work against them in round buildings.

  All fail. Any work for fluency, for freedom, fails.

  Battles. The wiping out of cities full of people.

  Long tracts of devastation.

  In one city : a scene of refugees, each allowed to take

  a suitcase of bedding, blankets, no more. An old man, a professor.

  He has hidden a few books and two small statues in a blanket

  and packed his case. He comes in his turn to the examining desk.

  He struggles about the lie he needs to tell. He lies, he declares nothing.

  Even after the lie, the suitcase is thrown over the cliff

  where all the statues lie broken, the books, pictures, the records.

  Long landscapes of devastation. Color modulated between

  sparse rigid monuments. Long orange landscapes

  shifting to yellow-orange to show a generation.

  Long passage of time to yellow. Only these elite,

  their army tread on yellow terrain. Their schools. Their children.

  A tradition of rigor, hatred and doom is now

  —generations after—the only sole tradition.

  I am looking at the times and time as at a dream.

  As at the recurrent dream of a locked room.

  I think of the solution of the sealed room mystery

  of the chicken and the egg, in which the chicken

  feeds on his cell, grows strong on the sealed room

  and finally

  in strength

  eating his prison

  pierces the shell.

  How can this room change state?

  I see its sky, its children. I cannot imagine.

  I look at the young faces of the children

  in this tradition, far down the colors of the years.

  They are still repeating their shut slogans

  with “war” substituted for freedom. But their faces glow.

  The children are marvelous, singing among the wars.

  They have needed the meanings, and their faces show

  this : the solution.

  The words have taken on

  all their forbidden meanings. The words mean their opposites.

  They must, they are needed.

  Children's faces, lit, unlit,

  the face of a child.

  LANDSCAPE WITH WAVE APPROACHING

  1

  All of the people of the play were there,

  swam in the mile-long wave, among cliff-flowers

  were pierced, hung and remembered a sunlit year.

  2

  By day white moths, the nightlong meteors

  flying like snow among the flowery trees—

  hissing like prophecy above those seas.

  3

  The city of the past. The past as a city

  and all the people in it, your childhood faces,

  their dances, their words developing, their hands.

  4

  The fertile season ending in a glitter;

  blight of the forest, orange, burning the trees away,

  the checkered light. Full length on naked sand.

  5

  All of the people of the play were there,

  smiling, telling their truths, coming to crisis.

  This water, this water, this water. These rocks, this piercing sea.

  6

  Flower of time, and a plague of white trilling in sunlight,

  the season advancing on the people of the play,

  the scars on the mountains and the body of fire.

  Carmel, California

  SEGRE SONG

  Your song where you lie long dead on the shore of a Spanish river—

  your song moves under the earth and through time, through air—

  your song I sing to the sun as we move

  and to the cities

  sing to the mimosa

  sing to the moon over my face

  BUNK JOHNSON BLOWING

  in memory of Leadbelly and his house on 59th Street

  They found him in the fields and called him back to music.

  Can't, he said, my teeth are gone. They bought him teeth.

  Bunk Johnson's trumpet on a California

  early May evening, calling me to

  breath of…

  up those stairs…

  calling me to

  look into

  the face of that

  trumpet

  experience

  and past it

  his eyes

  Jim and Rita beside me. We drank it. Jim had just come back

  from Sacramento the houses made of piano boxes the bar without

  a sign and the Mexicans drinking we drank the trumpet music

  and drank that black park moonlit beneath the willow trees,

  Bunk Johnson blowing all night out of that full moon.

  Two-towered church. Rita listening to it, all night

  music! said, I'm supposed to, despise them.

  Tears streaming down her face. Said, don't tell my ancestors.

  We three slid down that San Francisco hill.

  CANNIBAL BRATUSCHA

  Have you heard about Mr. Bratuscha?

  He led an orderly life

  With a splendid twelve-year-old daughter,

  A young and passionate wife—

  Bratuscha, the one they call Cannibal.

  Spring evening on Wednesday,

  The sky is years ago;

  The girl has been missing since Monday,

  Why don't the birches blow?

  And where's their daughter?

  Nine miles to the next village

  Deep in the forested past—

  Wheatland, marshland, daisies

  And a gold slender ghost.

  It's very difficult to keep them safe.

  She hasn't been seen and it's Thursday.

  Down by the river, raped?

  Under the birches, murdered?

  Don't let the fiend escape,

  First, we'll track him down and catch him.

  The river glittering in sunlight,

  The woods almost black—and she

  Was always a darling, the blonde young daughter,

  Gone gone vanished away.

  They say Bratuscha is ready to talk.

  O God he has told the whole story;


  Everything; he has said

  That he killed his golden daughter

  He ate her, he said it!

  Eaten by the cannibal, Cannibal Bratuscha.

  Down at the church her mother

  In the confession booth—

  She has supported his story,

  She has told the priest the truth;

  Horror, and now the villagers gather.

  They are ready to lynch Bratuscha,

  Pounding at his door—

  Over the outcries of the good people

  Hear the cannibal roar—

  He will hold out, bar the doorway, fight to the death.

  But who is this coming, whose shadow

  Runs down the river road?

  She is coming, she is running, she is

  Alive and abroad—

  She is here, she is well, she was in the next village.

  The roaring dreams of her father :

  He believed all he confessed—

  And the mother was threatened with hellfire

  By the village priest

  If she didn't tell everything, back up what Bratuscha said.

  This all took place some time ago

  Before all villages joined—

  When there were separate, uncivilized people,

  Only the birds, only the river, only dreams and the wind.

  She had just gone off for a few days, with a friend.

  But O God the little Bratuscha girl

  What will become of her?

  Her mother is guilt suggestion panic

  Her father of dreams, a murderer

  And in waking and in fantasy and now and forever.

  Who will help her and you and me and all those

  Children of the assumption of guilt

  And the roaring fantasy of nightmare

  The bomb the loathing all dreams spilt

  Upon this moment and the future and all unborn children.

  We must go deep go deep in our lives and our dreams—

  Remember Cannibal Bratuscha his wife and his young child

  And preserve our own ideas of guilt

  Of innocence and of the blessed wild

  To live out our own lives to make our own freedom to make

  the world.

  WHAT HAVE YOU BROUGHT HOME FROM THE WARS?

  What have you brought

  home from the wars, father?

  Scars.

  We fought far overseas; we knew

  the victory must

  be at home.

  But here I see

  only a trial by time

  of those

  who know.

  The public men all shout : Come bomb,

  come burn

  our hate.

  I do not

  want it shot;

  I want it solved.

  This is the word

  the dead men said.

  They said peace.

  I saw in the hot light

  of our century

  each face killed.

  ONE MONTH

  for Dorothy Lear

  All this time

  you were dead and I did not know

  I was learning to speak

  and speaking to you

  and you were not there

  I was seeing you

  tall, walking the corridor

  of that tall shining building

  I was learning to walk

  and walking to you

  and it was not true

  you were still living still lying still

  it was not true

  that you were giving me a rose

  telling me stories

  pouring a wine-story, there were bubbles in it

  all this time

  I was remembering untrue

  speaking untrue, seeing a lie.

  It is true.

  SILENCE OF VOLCANOES

  1

  The mountains and the shadows move away

  Under their snows to show an immense scene:

  A field of cathedrals. Green domes eye-green,

  Domes the color of trumpets. Obliterated rose

  And impure copper. Vaults are pale shoulders.

  Grass-haired and deformed,

  The dome-capped pyramid to the god of the air.

  A white dome under these volcanoes.

  This is the field that glittered in massacre,

  Time is boiling with domes.

  2

  A woman has been begging for ninety-seven years.

  The singing of her words against shadows of gold.

  I see her lean her face against this scene.

  The domes dissolve. All her unfallen tears.

  I remember a room for sale in a picture

  Torn as this landscape

  Obsessed by a single thing.

  3

  A hall at the National Pawnshop crowded with unsold bureaus.

  In sharp paint at the end of a blind aisle

  Red-robed and listening, the saint looks at the Sign.

  Books fold him in, strict black-and-white tile

  Lead to a sleeping garden where his lion,

  The guardian, lies in a silence of volcanoes.

  Hung in that air, there pierces his leaning soul

  The cheap tin trumpet that is the voice of God.

  Mexico

  WHAT THEY SAID

  : After I am dead, darling,

  my seventeen senses gone,

  I shall love you as you wish,

  no sex, no mouth, but bone—

  in the way you long for now,

  with my soul alone.

  : When we are neither woman nor man

  but bleached to skeleton—

  when you have changed, my darling,

  and all your senses gone,

  it is not me that you will love:

  you will love everyone.

  A LITTLE STONE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD, IN FLORIDA

  My son as child saying

  God

  is anything, even a little stone in the middle of the road,

  in Florida.

  Yesterday

  Nancy, my friend, after long illness:

  You know what can lift me up, take me right out of despair?

  No, what?

  Anything.

  THE BLUE FLOWER

  for Frances G. Wickes on her ninetieth birthday, August 28, 1965

  Stroke by stroke, in the country of the fragile

  stroke by stroke, each act a season

  speaking the years of making

  this flower

  shining over the fears

  over the cities

  and the camps of death.

  Shines from a field

  of eighty-seven years,

  the young child and the dream.

  In my city of stone,

  water and light

  I saw the blue flower

  held still, and flying—

  never seen by me

  but in your words given;

  fragile, mortal

  that endures.

  By turns flying and still.

  “Angkor Vat, a gray stone city

  but the flight of kingfishers

  all day enlivened it”—

  a blue flash given to us, past stone and time.

  Blaze of mortality

  piercing, tense

  the structure of a dream

  speaking and fragile,

  momentary,

  for now

  and ever and all

  your blue flower.

  WOMAN AS MARKET

  FORGETTING AND REMEMBERING

  What was it? What was it?

  Flashing beside me, lightning in daylight at the orange stand?

  Along the ranks of eggs, beside the loaves of dark and light?

  In a moment of morning, providing:

  the moment of the eggplant?

  the lemons? the fresh eggs?

  with their bright curves a
nd curves of shadow?

  the reds, the yellows, all the calling boxes.

  What did those forms say? What words have I forgotten?

  what spoke to me from the day?

  God in the cloud? my life in my forgetting?

  I have forgotten what it was

  that I have been trying to remember

  WORD OF MOUTH

  1 THE RETURN

  Westward from Sète

  as I went long before

  along my life

  as I went

  wave by wave—

  the long words of the sea

  the orange rooftop tiles

  back to the boundary

  where I had been before.

  Spain.

  Sex of cactus and of cypresses,

  Tile-orange, green; olive; black. The sea.

  One man. Beethoven radio. War.

  Threat of all life. Within my belief's body.

  Within my morning, music. High colored mountain

  along the seacoast

  where the swallows fly.

  Prolonged

  beyond your cries and your cities.

  Along my life and death backward toward that morning

  when all things fell open and I went into Spain.

  One man. Sardana music. This frontier.

  Where I now come again.

  I stop.

  I do not pass.

  Wave under wave

  like the divisive South

  afire in the country of my birth.

  A moment of glass. All down the coast I face

  as far as vision, blue, memory of blue.

  Seen now. Why do I not go in? I stand.

  I cannot pass. History, destroyed music.

  I need to go into.

  In a dream I have seen

  Spain, sleeping children:

  before me:

  as I drive

  as I go

  (I need to go into

  this country

  of love and)

  wave after wave

  they lie

  in a deep forest.

  As the driving light

  touches them

  (I need this country

  of love and death)

  they begin to rouse.

  They wake.

  2 WORD OF MOUTH

  Speeding back from the border.

  A rock came spinning up

  cast from the wheels of a car.

  Crackled the windshield glass.

  Glitter before my eyes like a man made of snow

  lying over the hood, blind white except for glints

  an inch of sight where Languedoc shines through.

  You on my one side, you on the other!

  What I have is dazzle. My son; my friend;

 

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