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;
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 44
