Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser

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Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 46

by Janet Kaufman


  This is not the past walking into the future,

  the walk is painful, into the present, the dance

  not visible as dance until much later.

  These dancers are discoverers of God.

  We knew we had all crossed over when we heard the song.

  Out of a life of building lack on lack:

  the slaves refusing slavery, escaping into faith:

  an army who came to the ocean: the walkers

  who walked through the opposites, from I to opened Thou,

  city and cleave of the sea. Those at flaming Nauvoo,

  the ice on the great river: the escaping Negroes,

  swamp and wild city: the shivering children of Paris

  and the glass black hearses; those on the Long March:

  all those who together are the frontier, forehead of man.

  Where the wilderness enters, the world, the song of the world.

  Akiba rescued, secretly, in the clothes of death

  by his disciples carried from Jerusalem

  in blackness journeying to find his journey

  to whatever he was loving with his life.

  The wilderness journey through which we move

  under the whirlwind truth into the new,

  the only accurate. A cluster of lights at night:

  faces before the pillar of fire. A child watching

  while the sea breaks open. This night. The way in.

  Barbarian music, a new song.

  Acknowledging opened water, possibility:

  open like a woman to this meaning.

  In a time of building statues of the stars,

  valuing certain partial ferocious skills

  while past us the chill and immense wilderness

  spreads its one-color wings until we know

  rock, water, flame, cloud, or the floor of the sea,

  the world is a sign, a way of speaking. To find.

  What shall we find? Energies, rhythms, journey.

  Ways to discover. The song of the way in.

  FOR THE SONG OF SONGS

  However the voices rise

  They are the shepherd, the king,

  The woman; dreams,

  Holy desire.

  Whether the voices

  Be many the dance around

  Or body led by one body

  Whose bed is green,

  I defend the desire

  Lightning and poetry

  Alone in the dark city

  Or breast to breast.

  Champion of light I am

  The wounded holy light,

  The woman in her dreams

  And the man answering.

  You who answer their dreams

  Are the ruler of wine

  Emperor of clouds

  And the riches of men.

  This song

  Is the creation

  The day of this song

  The day of the birth of the world.

  Whether a thousand years

  Forget this woman, this king,

  Whether two thousand years

  Forget the shepherd of dreams.

  If none remember

  Who is lover, who the beloved,

  Whether the poet be

  Woman or man,

  The desire will make

  A way through the wilderness

  The leopard mountains

  And the lips of the sleepers.

  Holy way of desire,

  King, lion, the mouth of the poet,

  The woman who dreams

  And the answerer of dreams.

  In these delights

  Is eternity of seed,

  The verge of life,

  Body of dreaming.

  THE BONDS

  In the wine country, poverty, they drink no wine—

  In the endless night of love he lies, apart from love—

  In the landscape of the Word he stares, he has no word.

  He hates and hungers for his immense need.

  He is young. This is a shepherd who rages at learning,

  Having no words. Looks past green grass and sees a woman.

  She, Rachel, who is come to recognize.

  In the huge wordless shepherd she finds Akiba.

  To find the burning Word. To learn to speak.

  The body of Rachel says, the marriage says,

  The eyes of Rachel say, and water upon rock

  Cutting its groove all year says All things learn.

  He learns with his new son whose eyes are wine.

  To sing continually, to find the word.

  He comes to teaching, greater than the deed

  Because it begets the deed, he comes to the stone

  Of long ordeal, and suddenly knows the brook

  Offering water, the citron fragrance, the light of candles.

  All given, and always the giver loses nothing.

  In giving, praising, we move beneath clouds of honor,

  In giving, in praise, we take gifts that are given,

  The spark from one to the other leaping, a bond

  Of light, and we come to recognize the rock;

  We are the rock acknowledging water, and water

  Fire, and woman man, all brought through wilderness;

  And Rachel finding in the wordless shepherd

  Akiba who can now come to his power and speak:

  The need to give having found the need to become:

  More than the calf wants to suck, the cow wants to give such.

  AKIBA MARTYR

  When his death confronted him, it had the face of his friend

  Rufus the Roman general with his claws of pain,

  His executioner. This was an old man under iron rakes

  Tearing through to the bone. He made no cry.

  After the failure of all missions. At ninety, going

  To Hadrian in Egypt, the silver-helmed,

  Named for a sea. To intercede. Do not build in the rebuilt Temple.

  Your statue, do not make it a shrine to you.

  Antinous smiling. Interpreters. This is an old man, pleading.

  Incense of fans. The emperor does not understand.

  He accepts his harvest, failures. He accepts faithlessness,

  Madness of friends, a failed life; and now the face of storm.

  Does the old man during uprising speak for compromise?

  In all but the last things. Not in the study itself.

  For this religion is a system of knowledge;

  Points may be one by one abandoned, but not the study.

  Does he preach passion and non-violence?

  Yes, and trees, crops, children honestly taught. He says:

  Prepare yourselves for suffering.

  Now the rule closes in, the last things are forbidden.

  There is no real survival without these.

  Now it is time for prison and the unknown.

  The old man flowers into spiritual fire.

  Streaking of agony across the sky.

  Torn black. Red racing on blackness. Dawn.

  Rufus looks at him over the rakes of death

  Asking, “What is it?

  Have you magic powers? Or do you feel no pain?”

  The old man answers, “No. But there is a commandment

  saying

  Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,

  with all thy soul and with all thy might.

  I knew that I loved him with all my heart and might.

  Now I know that I love him with all my life.”

  The look of delight of the martyr

  Among the colors of pain, at last knowing his own response

  Total and unified.

  To love God with all the heart, all passion,

  Every desire called evil, turned toward unity,

  All the opposites, all in the dialogue.

  All the dark and light of the heart, of life made whole.

  Surpassing the known life, day and ideas.

  My hope
, my life, my burst of consciousness:

  To confirm my life in the time of confrontation.

  The old man saying Shema.

  The death of Akiba.

  THE WITNESS

  Who is the witness? What voice moves across time,

  Speaks for the life and death as witness voice?

  Moving tonight on this city, this river, my winter street?

  He saw it, the one witness. Tonight the life as legend

  Goes building a meeting for me in the veins of night

  Adding its scenes and its songs. Here is the man transformed,

  The tall shepherd, the law, the false messiah, all;

  You who come after me far from tonight finding

  These lives that ask you always Who is the witness—

  Take from us acts of encounter we at night

  Wake to attempt, as signs, seeds of beginning,

  Given from darkness and remembering darkness,

  Take from our light given to you our meetings.

  Time tells us men and women, tells us You

  The witness, your moment covered with signs, your self.

  Tells us this moment, saying You are the meeting.

  You are made of signs, your eyes and your song.

  Your dance the dance, the walk into the present.

  All this we are and accept, being made of signs, speaking

  To you, in time not yet born.

  The witness is myself.

  And you,

  The signs, the journeys of the night, survive.

  KÄTHE KOLLWITZ

  1

  Held between wars

  my lifetime

  among wars, the big hands of the world of death

  my lifetime

  listens to yours.

  The faces of the sufferers

  in the street, in dailiness,

  their lives showing

  through their bodies

  a look as of music

  the revolutionary look

  that says I am in the world

  to change the world

  my lifetime

  is to love to endure to suffer the music

  to set its portrait

  up as a sheet of the world

  the most moving the most alive

  Easter and bone

  and Faust walking among flowers of the world

  and the child alive within the living woman, music of man,

  and death holding my lifetime between great hands

  the hands of enduring life

  that suffers the gifts and madness of full life, on earth, in our time,

  and through my life, through my eyes, through my arms and hands

  may give the face of this music in portrait waiting for

  the unknown person

  held in the two hands, you.

  2

  Woman as gates, saying :

  “The process is after all like music,

  like the development of a piece of music.

  The fugues come back and

  again and again

  interweave.

  A theme may seem to have been put aside,

  but it keeps returning—

  the same thing modulated,

  somewhat changed in form.

  Usually richer.

  And it is very good that this is so.”

  A woman pouring her opposites.

  “After all there are happy things in life too.

  Why do you show only the dark side?”

  “I could not answer this. But I know—

  in the beginning my impulse to know

  the working life

  had little to do with

  pity or sympathy.

  I simply felt

  that the life of the workers was beautiful.”

  She said, “I am groping in the dark.”

  She said, “When the door opens, of sensuality,

  then you will understand it too. The struggle begins.

  Never again to be free of it,

  often you will feel it to be your enemy.

  Sometimes

  you will almost suffocate,

  such joy it brings.”

  Saying of her husband : “My wish

  is to die after Karl.

  I know no person who can love as he can,

  with his whole soul.

  Often this love has oppressed me;

  I wanted to be free.

  But often too it has made me

  so terribly happy.”

  She said : “We rowed over to Carrara at dawn,

  climbed up to the marble quarries

  and rowed back at night. The drops of water

  fell like glittering stars

  from our oars.”

  She said : “As a matter of fact,

  I believe

  that bisexuality

  is almost a necessary factor

  in artistic production; at any rate,

  the tinge of masculinity within me

  helped me

  in my work.”

  She said : “The only technique I can still manage.

  It's hardly a technique at all, lithography.

  In it

  only the essentials count.”

  A tight-lipped man in a restaurant last night saying to me :

  “Kollwitz? She's too black-and-white.”

  3

  Held among wars, watching

  all of them

  all these people

  weavers,

  Carmagnole

  Looking at

  all of them

  death, the children

  patients in waiting-rooms

  famine

  the street

  the corpse with the baby

  floating, on the dark river

  A woman seeing

  the violent, inexorable

  movement of nakedness

  and the confession of No

  the confession of great weakness, war,

  all streaming to one son killed, Peter;

  even the son left living; repeated,

  the father, the mother; the grandson

  another Peter killed in another war; firestorm;

  dark, light, as two hands,

  this pole and that pole as the gates.

  What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?

  The world would split open

  4 SONG : THE CALLING-UP

  Rumor, stir of ripeness

  rising within this girl

  sensual blossoming

  of meaning, its light and form.

  The birth-cry summoning

  out of the male, the father

  from the warm woman

  a mother in response.

  The word of death

  calls up the fight with stone

  wrestle with grief with time

  from the material make

  an art harder than bronze.

  5 SELF-PORTRAIT

  Mouth looking directly at you

  eyes in their inwardness looking

  directly at you

  half light half darkness

  woman, strong, German, young artist

  flows into

  wide sensual mouth meditating

  looking right at you

  eyes shadowed with brave hand

  looking deep at you

  flows into

  wounded brave mouth

  grieving and hooded eyes

  alive, German, in her first War

  flows into

  strength of the worn face

  a skein of lines

  broods, flows into

  mothers among the war graves

  bent over death

  facing the father

  stubborn upon the field

  flows into

  the marks of her knowing—

  Nie Wieder Krieg

  repeated in the eyes

  flows into

  “Seedcorn must not be ground


  and the grooved cheek

  lips drawn fine

  the down-drawn grief

  face of our age

  flows into

  Pieta, mother and

  between her knees

  life as her son in death

  pouring from the sky of

  one more war

  flows into

  face almost obliterated

  hand over the mouth forever

  hand over one eye now

  the other great eye

  closed

  5

  THE SPEED OF DARKNESS

  1

  Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis

  Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt

  Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child.

  Resurrection music, silence, and surf.

  2

  No longer speaking

  Listening with the whole body

  And with every drop of blood

  Overtaken by silence

  But this same silence is become speech

  With the speed of darkness.

  3

  Stillness during war, the lake.

  The unmoving spruces.

  Glints over the water.

  Faces, voices. You are far away.

  A tree that trembles.

  I am the tree that trembles and trembles.

  4

  After the lifting of the mist

  after the lift of the heavy rains

  the sky stands clear

  and the cries of the city risen in day

  I remember the buildings are space

  walled, to let space be used for living

  I mind this room is space

  this drinking glass is space

  whose boundary of glass

  lets me give you drink and space to drink

  your hand, my hand being space

  containing skies and constellations

  your face

  carries the reaches of air

  I know I am space

  my words are air.

  5

  Between between

  the man : act exact

  woman : in curve senses in their maze

  frail orbits, green tries, games of stars

  shape of the body speaking its evidence

  6

  I look across at the real

  vulnerable involved naked

  devoted to the present of all I care for

  the world of its history leading to this moment.

  7

  Life the announcer.

  I assure you

  there are many ways to have a child.

  I bastard mother

  promise you

  there are many ways to be born.

  They all come forth

  in their own grace.

  8

  Ends of the earth join tonight

  with blazing stars upon their meeting.

  These sons, these sons

  fall burning into Asia.

  9

  Time comes into it.

  Say it. Say it.

  The universe is made of stories,

  not of atoms.

 

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